What's your childcare contingecy?

[MotherGirth]

Poor DD has a vicious vomiting bug. She had a virus and a chest infection and missed a whole week of school just two weeks ago. No doubt DS (and I) will catch it too. DH had it last week and had 2.5 days off sick.

The first week that DD was off we were out of childcare options by the Friday, so despite working PT I had to take the day off. DH had taken one day and my DSM stepped in on her own day off.

We don't have any other options at the moment. My DM is working PT and wiped out by cancer treatment the rest of the time ; MIL works school hours every day; FIL is recovering from a heart attack and DF works FT.

So how do you make it work? It seems to me that the only answer is for one of us not to work, or to work from home (not a possibility in my field or DH's current job). Financially absolutely out of the question.

It depends on your work drspouse.

My point wasn't the working from home particularly. My point was that I set up on my own rather than stay in full time employment so that I had that flexibility and can organise my own work.

A lot of the time I do work from home as it happens, and if I do have a sick child with me, I can at least do some emails etc, although not necessarily phone calls unless they are asleep, and then can make up time later as I said in my previous post.

Obviously working from home you need childcare, as you point out, but for some people, depending on the work, they will either be able to get at least some done on those occasions, and/or make it up at night/weekends.

atthestrokeoftwelve well, yes, I'm sure that's true, but my work which generally can be done at home, and is fairly standard office work (working at a computer, making some phone calls, occasional paperwork on real paper) suffers greatly from the interference of a sick toddler (or, really, any kind of toddler).

I'd love to have the kind of toddler that some people seem to have who can amuse themselves for hours and never requires feeding, cooking for, a nappy change, or any attention, but sadly I don't have that kind. My boss seems to have had that kind in the past, unfortunately.

I agree, but homeworking can often give the flexibility that office based jobs don't.
I can pretty much abandon my work if I have a sick child to look after, I can cut my hours dramatically during school holidays, and increase my hours during term time.
I can work a 5 hour week or a 50 hour week.

flowery yes I take your point. It kind of depends what you do, too, as if I set up a crafting business, for example, I might in general be able to do everything from home, at hours that suit me, but if I had a rush job I can see not being able to take a couple of days off at short notice. Likewise if I had a catering business then I can see some jobs needing me out of the house at set times. The type of business I'd be personally best placed to set up would involve school aged children, to some extent, so out of school hours. So it does depend on what you can/want to do.

Personally, I can't do exactly what I do now and set my own hours 100% (though I know most people don't do that when they set up their own business) - I could do much worse paid freelance work in my field for the same types of employers, but they'd still set the hours I had to be on site... I can do quite a lot of my current job away from the office, but not all of it - and I can't do a full day's work with a toddler at home full time, despite what my boss thinks.

I work for a FTSE company with a strong homeworking policy. It has saved me many a time. However my DS's have never really been ill and when they were younger I did get my DM to come and sit with them (she doesnt live locally but if I drove to pick her up she was fine with it!).

What did surprise me was colleagues who seemed to think that a home working policy meant you didnt have to have ANY childcare.

handcream exactly that. We have a notification system where you are supposed to, at a minimum, state whether you are unavailable by email - it's accepted that if you can work from home you are allowed to. I don't specify what I'm doing generally if I'm not available, just that I'm not available (not their business if I have a medical appointment for example). One colleague says "working from home, caring for grandchildren" - fine if teenagers and just need the TV and X-box, not if toddlers!

We have a great childminder who will take them with most things except D&V. I do swaps with other Mums on our days off, or DH and I work a half day each. One memorable day we both had deadlines, so I was in the office at 4am, worked until 12pm, came home then DH went to work at 1pm and got home about 9pm.

Not a day I wish to do again to be honest, and the next day wasn't much cop either.

Luckily we both have a degree of autnomony with our diaries, so it isn't always a huge issue, plus DH owns part of the company he works for, so although he is more senior than me, it's actually easier for him to take time off.

DH has no flexibility whatsoever so it is all down to me.

I mainly work from home so unless I have a meeting / appointment it is not too much of an issue, if I have then my parents live 20 minutes away and will always help if they can.

Dsis also works part time so we step in and help each other out too.

I think there is a huge difference when you are employed and when you are self employed.
When you are self employed it is not just that you hae no income, but s often there is no one else to take up the slack you are worried you are damaging your business for the future.
Then when like me only a small proportion of your work can be done from home and if it is incredibly time sensitive - deaths could occur if I don't go to work.

Add to that being a Lone parent, whose Ex can not see the DC due to child protection issues. Then pressure to find a solution is incredible.
Emergency nannies are not cheap, however whilst I might make a loss on that day in the big picture the roof is still over our heads and we get to eat.
I also take the view that DC won't be young forever I have to make certain adjustments now to ensure my future career.

I'm impressed at all the flexible jobs. Would love to advise my children to follow suit. Which careers allow so much home working?

I think teaching gives some flexibility, however you do have to earn the right to home work and I'm not a teacher although my DM was. I had to tell a member of my team that if she wanted to work at home she had to get some childcare. We are called by clients, we need to attend various audios and 50% of the time we are at face to face meetings.

She said she would take it to the union!

Goodness the thing is, home working does not help me in the slightest with childcare at the moment. If childcare falls through, it isn't home working, it's home childcare.

It might be a help when DS reaches school age (or to be more strictly accurate, when any potential future DC2 reaches school age) as I could possibly then pick them up from after school club a little earlier than if I was coming from the office, or even potentially plonk them in front of the TV leave them to do their homework unsupervised when mature enough to do that, at home.

But at the moment, it doesn't help at all. It's waved around as one of the things that makes my employer oh-so-family-friendly, people say "can't you work during nap time and in the evenings", well yes I can, but that's, what, 3 hours in the day (given the time I am up in the mornings and therefore the time I go to bed after toddler bedtime, dinner etc.). Which is not a full day and is only going to lead to complaints that stuff hasn't been done, even if nobody is clocking me in and out.

But drspouse, "not a full day" is still more than none. I don't think anyone expects to get a full days work done when looking after toddlers, sick or not.

But the advantage of a job you can do at home is that when you have to have a day looking after sick children, you can at least get some work done, as opposed to jobs where you are either there or you're not. 3 hours work on a day you're looking after a sick child sounds like pretty good going to me!

Absolutely flowery. I worked from home with a two year old and a baby- while I was breastfeeding. I could sneak in 30 minutes here and there, while they were asleep or occupied. I could fit in an hour before they woke in the morning or after they had gone to bed.

My employer has started to heavily promote home working (they have run out of space) and it keeps being dangled at me as a massive perk as a working parent. In the discussion above, I agree that if I have to take an emergency day at home due to DC sickness I might be able to get a few things done, but it wouldn't really be working at home more keeping an eye on emergencies and respond to urgent queries. I couldn't meet (or have a call with) a client or write a PowerPoint deck pitching for a bigger budget.

I'm on ML with ds2 now and just can't see myself working at home in future: I've lost the "study" to his bedroom and the rest of the place is so stacked with stuff I can't see how I'll concentrate properly. I'm really putting my mind to how we'd manage 2 sets of chickenpox.

And it seems like some jobs are flexible that you can make the hours up on other days, so as long as you tick over urgent phone calls/emails you are ok.

My friend works in a large bank and her day is flexitime, with hours taken off easily made up. She doesn't have children but can easily wait home for goods, book doctors/dentists etc.

Similarly I know some Occupational Therapists for whom it may not be ideal, but it is possible, to move clients/meetings or swap days they work.

When I first left uni I worked in admin in a doctors surgery. We could easily change our hours/ swap days.

It so depends on the job. Both my husband and I (if I return to teaching) will be in jobs where we simply can't take time out. I can't see how people do this wihtout supportive family.

The problem with saying that 3 hours work is better than no work is that if I'm officially "working", people get cross if I haven't done all the tasks I was supposed to be doing. It IS just firefighting and I can't do any meetings (not even by Skype, even though I work with people in different time zones sometimes, evening isn't helpful for them).

And most of my serious work is large tasks that involve serious hours on several days - so none of those get finished, or even started. It's been said that everyone always does easy, short but supposedly urgent work tasks first and those aren't always the most important or the most productive. So all you do is a couple of quick things that are requested by people who shout the loudest, while the really important tasks get ignored - and colleagues quite rightly say "but you have been working every day this week, why hasn't this been done? When can we meet?"

If I have a sick child, I'd rather just say "sorry, I have a sick child, I'm not working today/this morning" and use my sick child leave.