If anyone's in this situation, as I will be, i'd be really grateful and interested to hear how you manage and what kind of work you do.
I have two DC. My older DC will start school in September, and my younger DC gets 15 free hours of nursery from January 2013. So i could potentially have a year before younger DC starts school where I could have two days a week to study/train/do voluntary work - basically, make myself fit to get back into the workplace!
But really, I am just wondering how on earth I will even manage to work, because as I say, DH works v.long hours so cannot help at all, and we have zero family help. What job can I do from 9.30am-3pm?? I hear that even if you work in a school, you still need wrap around childcare to get your own children to and from school as you have to be there when school starts and finishes. Obviously, there is the paid childcare option, but i'm not a very high earner, so i'm worried that anything I do make will be swallowed up by childcare - and that's even before I think about school holidays.
Also, we manage to maintain a fairly smooth family life at the moment thanks to me being a SAHM - i'm a bit reluctant to plunge us all into a harder life for a negligible amount of money.
Any thoughts and experiences would be gratefully received - i'm feeling rather daunted by the whole business at the moment 