Sorry Xenia...

[duchesse]

...for starting that thread when I didn't believe you existed (and I genuinely didn't). I've done some proper research now, and realise that you are real person with fantastic real achievement. I apologise unreservedly for my previous thread, which was genuinely not designed to get at you since I did not believe you existed. I am aghast and incredibly impressed at how much you have achieved, and look forward to sparring with you again some time...

(starts looking for the old tent, and that sleeping bag the cat gave birth on)

Message withdrawn

have I missed something. I don't think anyone is saying she can't lennygrrl.

would we set up a rota for doing the dishes?

(wonders if this is now a new thread or another way of looking at the same question)

would some of us be better suited to staying and tending the campfire and others to killing the rabbits/fennel?

would we be able to maintain a flat structure with love and goodwill or is it inevitable that the fennel killers want the fire tenders to clean the boots as well?

(MrsM gets the tea on, sneakily injecting hers with a large splash of 'ye olde rhum' from her hip flask to fire her up again...)

rabbit and fennel? < shudder >

and @ pankhurst

bagsy I kill fennel.

My alter ego is oh so different from my rl persona...

I nominate you as Jester and myself as Scribe@pankhurst (ie. we can sit around drinking tea and wittering).

Xenia is clearly over qualified for rabbit hunting, but I think she'd be ideal for stoking the fire.

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lennygrrrl, I have a long standing issue with Xenia's amnesia when it comes to her previous posts. How can she say she has never dismissed, nay, condemned SAHMs / PT workers? I cannot be faffed to drag up old posts to demonstrate (although I'm sorely tempted), but it does rile me a little.

Xenia this is definitely the most mellow thread I've read from you! To be fair, you HAVE in the past intimated that plenty of us have done things wrong - or done things that have betrayed a stunning lack of intelligence, or a sell-out of wimmin power etc. You're sounding a bit more like the rest of us! You even wrote about compromise!

I think of the things that may well mark you out as unusual is not so much the early focus (I had VERY clear ideas about my life from when I was about 9) but the fact that the focus stayed pretty consistent and you have had the good luck and determination (and yes, brains etc.) to stick with them through good times and bad. You did have a DH in a career that allowed there to be more of a back seat taken, you did not have fertility problems or children with disabilities etc.

So far, I have achieved some of my ambitions, failed in others, changed some of them (decided not to become an astronaut for example...). I'm hoping good things for my next decade (milestone birthday coming up - eek!)but I'm still trying to work out my real long term plans and start mapping a path. I have the basic shape, but having a child has shaken some of the timings and potentially the finer details - there is another variable that was not there before. - and that is assuming nothing (else) goes pear shaped.

As an aside, I can supply head torches and some damn fine insect repellent for the camping and am good at removing leeches should the occasion demand. Crap at singing kum byah though (not even sure how to write it - wasted youth, clearly)

Good post@Elffriend (pours her a cup of Bovril and offers her a mossy log to sit on ...)

Ta!

EVERYBODY!!!!!

Kum by yah, m'lord, Kum by yah...

(stops shocked)

the astronaut thing is OFF the table???? but you've still got the legs for it! what are you thinking of?

i'm looking at the posts about going to parisien nurseries. i'm thinking there's a WHOLE big world out there that still needs exploring.

(resumes singing)

woooohooooo, kum by yah...

Actually, I got all arsey about the astronaut thing when my Dad informed me that they didn't let women become fighter pilots (which I thought I needed to do prior tobecoming an astronaut). That outraged me so badly I dismissed the whole idea.

As it turns out, roundabouts make me feel sick, so not sure I'd be so good at the whole lack of gravity thing. I'll now have to wait until they invent inertial dampeners a la star trek!

Would still leap at the chance to go into space though, were it on offer to me.

(resumes singing Kum By Yah and slides along log toward MrsMattie's rum flask...)

amidaiwish, £70K is a good wage. At top rate of tax, you still bring home around £3,500 a month. Nurseries for 2 children will cost about £1,000 to 1,200 X 2, but that is likely to be less because the second child is usually over 2 and it gets cheaper £800-1,000, and surestart grant kicks in after 3 to give about £160 savings. Your rail ticket will come up to, I don't know, £200 a month max? That still gives you at around £1,000 a month disposable after childcare and work costs. That pretty good, I thought.

Like Xenia says, the high childcare costs are frontloaded. It will generally cheaper, although there is the big question of whether you want to go the private schooling route. So just hanging in there, even for little or negative disposable initially, could work out in the long run, if working is what you want to do.

Aha! Another example of why our destiny is not yet in our hands.

I can see the sanity in bailing OUT of a system that wants us to clean the plane but won't give us our own goggles.

(Looks sideways at Elffy and briefly wonders whether past bouts of roundabout sickness had anything to do with fondness for hipflasks. Tears leg off fennel with teeth)

anna, I am a bit surprised about there being no option if France (or do you mean Paris) of parents paying for quality children. And that they must either use unqualified nounous, grandparents (if they are lucky) or stat-at-home. Something does not sound right. Or you might have spotted a gap in the market.

Duchesse seems to think that there are good creches outside Paris (I am sorry but I am not familiar with the difference between a nursery and a creche in France).

I am sure in Paris it is more difficult to find good childcare, as it is in London re: nurseries/childminders. But to not even have a choice of paying for or putting oneself down on the wait list for a good creche/nursery seems to consign swathes of dedicated mothers who prefer to work p/ft to SAHM. Is that what is happening?

If anyone is coming on the island it ought to be a man, I'm afraid. I suppose I could hire it out for people to lose weight on - no chance to eat junk food, just fish, rice, veg we brought on to it. No rabbits, sorry. It has a bird colony on it. I wonder what those birds taste like.

blueshoes, i know, it would cover the cost but only just. doing 4 days a week would net just under £3k. then the nursery fees are still £2k even with the discount DD1 and nursery grant. It it was a 9-5 job then yes, it would be worth it. But it involves a fair bit of travelling, impossible to leave at 5 everyday to get to the nursery without a high level of stress. If my dh had a 9-5 job then we could juggle it between us, but he doesn't - he is away a lot in the US and Far East.

Anyway it all sounds like excuses and i am lucky in that he earned (just) enough to enable me to leave work and start up my own business which only just covers the 2 day nursery fees i currently have.

My point was that even on a very good salary like i was on, it wasn't enough to cover the breadth and flexibility of childcare that i needed if you take into account the other associated costs of working (travel, clothes, lunches, etc etc.)

I read somewhere once that parrots taste disgusting. So if they're parrots, probably best stick to the fennel.

So for student children picking jobs if they do intend to work and have children at the same time they might like to consider whether they could afford child care when making those career choices I suppose.

Not parrots. I took as close up photos of the birds that I could last month. They seem quite small and scrawny, some kind of sea bird. We could find and eat the snake I suppose but the main thin people go to that area for is that it has some of the best fishing in the world and there are crabs definitely although I've not seen one as big as you see in shops.

amidaiwish, I read 'travel' as 'commute', rather than travelling for work to other countries. And £70 is ft salary rather than prorated. I see the problem - any job that requires regular travelling really balls thing up childcare-wise. Glad you at least can work those 2 days.

blueshoes - no. The standards for paid childcare are just lower here.

There is no gap in the market - parents are not prepared to spend much on childcare (as, indeed, they are not prepared to spend much on school/education).

I have friends (English, Canadian) who have imported qualified nannies from England, to whom they paid English-level salaries. I'm sure they were kind, well-meaning employers but they ended up with miserable, lonely nannies who felt they were looked down upon by society here.