This is the downside to our current childcare arrangements: When school is out, well, one of us is taking time off. The after school program only runs when school is in session, and for Captain Adventure we have diddly squat other than his preschool program – which has him gone
Fortunately, he looooooooves the bus.
With things being the way they are right now (read as: Tama is so extremely under-employed it is vaguely ridiculous), the downside way doesn’t outweigh the upside, which is that instead of paying $500 weekly for full-time school-or-no-school daycare, we pay $500 monthly for the after school program for the girls.
I tell you what, when times were flush I might have been willing to pay that simply so I didn’t have to deal with the multiple pickup times. THIS kid out at 2:20, THIS one at 2:55, and #3 at 3:15. GAH!
Eh, not really. C’mon. A person who finds herself pressed for time who still can’t make herself pay $4 for a loaf of bread because seriously, I could totally make TWO loaves for a buck! is hardly going to decide that she’d rather pay $500 than have to cool her heels around the school for an hour and a half each day.
But I digress.
It’s funny, really, how you both look forward to and dread these breaks. On the one hand, it’s nice to have family time with the kids.
On the other hand, argh!, those kids! The noise! The messes! The constant demands for snacks and drinks! “I know you just made a three course meal half an hour ago, but I didn’t want that and now I’m hungry again!”
The way you can’t do anything without the risk of somebody bursting in five seconds after you start to announce that a toilet is overflowing, someone is bleeding, or the cat is trapped behind the sofa.
It can be hard for me to go without a plan for my time. Even if I don’t actually do everything on my list, I like to have one – a general outline of how I expect the day to go.
But when all the kids are home, well. “Plan” is another word for “frustration,” because whatever plan I have is guaranteed to not work out the way I expect.
In related news, there are ten skeins of freshly washed wool hanging up to dry in my bathroom. The plan, you see, is that over the next couple days they will be transformed from their current raw state into a colorful hand-dyed ready to knit with one.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Yeah, that’s right. I’m planning to finish this process not today (which is rather taken up with other things, like arm-wrestling with
We shall see.
I’m considering it a good trial run for the summer, because this summer? I’m not paying no $500 a week for summer camp / daycare. The girls didn’t enjoy it anyway, and honestly I’m not expecting this summer to be any better than last summer for me, job-wise.
The recession, it still has us in its teeth…and it isn’t showing a lot of signs of letting go any time soon.
And with that, my dear ones…I leave you. Possibly for an entire week.
Or possibly not.
It all depends on what my
1 comment:
Why don't you consider hiring a high school student to come in and entertain your kids for a few hours everyday so you can get some work done. It would cost you a lot less then $500/wk and you can still have lot's of family time!
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