My mum has offered to look after DD for one day a week when I go back to work. DD will be a year old (she's currently 8 months). DH and I will both be working part time so we'll share the care of DD the rest of the week. As my mum lives an hour away, she reckons she'd need to come down the night before (I agree). Oh, and by the way, my parents are long divorced, so grandpa doesn't really feature in this particular issue.
In principle, DH and I think this would be a great arrangement - DD loves seeing her granny and I think my mum has fairly similar basic ideas about how to look after children as me. I don't want my mum to feel taken advantage of though, as this would save us a lot of money in childcare (nurseries are about £60 a day round here, so that's around £3000 a year!). Presumably we'd pay her petrol and any expenses but does anyone give money over and above this?
Could someone point me in the direction of some old threads covering things like:
- pros and cons of this arrangement
*how to make it work from a granny's point of view and from the parents' point of view
*how you figure out the money issue (seems like a potentially very sticky issue to me)
This is on the assumption that this has all been gone over before on MN - if not, then any advice on the above issues (or something crucial I've missed) would be very gratefully received.
Thanks very much!