School holidays with 2 working parents??????????

[Tom]

How the hell do you manage school holidays????

My boy, Cole, is eligible for State Nursery this September - between 1 and 3.30 pm. After payin gover £200 a week for nursery, this is a blessed relief, and it's not hard to figure out how things can work in term time...

My wife and I both work from home, with complete flexibility... so she can look after our boy in the morning until he goes to nursery at 1pm, and I'll work early morning until 3.30, then pick him up and take over until bedtime... easy. BUT.

What the hell do you do in the school holidays? I get 5 weeks holiday a year, and she is self employed, so if she stops working, she stops earning. It's about 13/14 weeks in the year when there's no childcare provision whatsoever... or at least none that I know about.

So it seems like we'll have to keep him in day nursery until he goes to school proper in a year's time, which will cost us loads, but he'll get decent educational input and there's no problem with holidays... OR... another solution that I've not heard of yet.

And anways, when he starts school, the same problems remain - what the hell do you do in the school holidays?????

In any case, the fatal flaw in Serpahina's argument is that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the offspring of working parents suffer in any respect whatsoever.

Seraphina. I do not enjoy looking after my baby full time. I am not a "baby" person. Whilst I enjoy my 3 hours with dd every evening, and every weekend, I know that being with her full time would drive me crazy. In your perfect world does that mean I should have been banned from having children?
I am insulted by your suggestion that I allow monkeys to look after her instead of me. I send her to a nursery and pay £1,145 per month so that she can be looked after by people who enjoy it and are good at it. A very large proprtion of that money goes directly to the wages of the people who look after her, as evidenced by the fact that only one member of staff (out of 31) has left the nursery since she started 8 months ago - and that was to have a baby of her own. My daughter greatly benefits from the interaction with other children, and the far wider range of activities she has a chance to take part in.

I completely disagree with your assertion that a child needs to be looked after by it's parents in the frst three years. I actually feel that the next 10 are when I need to be around to help form my childs developing personality, and also know (because I looked after my much younger sister) that I will enjoy and be good at doing this job.

I am happy that you have been able to find a way of bringing up your children that suits you. Please don't criticise me and others for finding a solution that suits us. And by us I mean me and my daughter.

Oh and princesspeahead - you rock

Serephina soes not look after her DD fulltime at all. She works part time. Which brings me to this point...

Serephina you say that "Personally I would rather give my child personal attention despite the financial penalties myself and dp pay for this." yet you work part time and your parner full time. How do you give your child personal attention when you are at work? How many days do you work?

seraphina I'm not too sure what quoting me back to me achieves, apart from publishing to a wider audience exactly how pea-headed I have become now that I am heavily pregnant. which I'm sure will make a lot of other heavily pregnant mumsnetters who feel their brain has also turned to mush feel a lot better!
I have never contributed to threads about the very real financial struggles and sacrifices that many mumsnetters make for their children and to achieve what, for them, makes up a balanced family life (and different families have different needs), for the simple fact that I don't have any financial struggles. I am aware that I am lucky in this respect and I have huge admiration for how some people cope with their difficult situations. However my financial fortune is not something that I feel I need to or have any intention of apologising for, and where you and I clearly differ is that I never have judged people by how much money they have or don't have and I know a lot of people who have many multiples more and less money than me. I also know that money isn't everything, although am the first to admit that not having to worry about it removes a whole layer of stress from life. But things like health, good relationships with your partner, close friends, satisfaction with working/home life balance etc are also very important and those sorts of threads I do contribute to.
As I see it, the things that matter are how you deal with people, how you respect them for the choices they make, how you support others in their choices whether or not they are the same ones that you would make, etc. But I'm not sure why I'm bothering answering you, since I would guess that every single mumsnetter without exception would consider that making snide comments about another mumsnetter because they own a dog is so ridiculous it hardly deserves consideration!

So... erm... ahem... let's recap...

Options are...

1. Juggling with holiday entitlement and flexible work options to look after the children yourself/ves.

2. Co-ordinating with friends and family (if available) to cover the holdiday period together.

3. Using a combination of childminders and nurseries (early years) and holiday clubs (older kids) to provide an amount of paid care for the holidays.

4. A combination of all the above!

I think it means that every Easter we're gonna have to have a big meeting where we plan the entire summer!!

Tom - what about letting Seraphina watch them for you?

or you could REALLY plan ahead like I did Tom - I'm starting my maternity leave a couple of days before the school holidays begin! mind you, you'd need to discuss with your wife.

and before you get your calendar out, that means you need to conceive in Nov/December

My wife's self employed... so we lose money if she stops working! (gets whip out!!). We have to save up to have another baby, so it's not much of a cushy option.

my mum had to work really hard when we were little i still think she was/is the best mum in the world,you can be with your kids 24h. a day and still be a very lousy mum,i love being a full time mum, it`s bloody hard but is my choice and i have great respect for working mums

darn, and there i was thinking I'd solved all your problems...

my mum is also fabulous (the sort of mother that all my friends phone up to ask advice from!) and also worked throughout my childhood as a GP. At 66 she is still working almost full time as a GP so a) a wonderful role model growing up and b) not available for me to palm my children off on for some free childcare...

Yep, both my parents worked throughout my childhood and it is a complete irrelevancy as far as my relationship with them and pretty much anything else is concerned.

You can find responsible 16 year olds?????
Wow.

Bloody hell, glad I had my coffee to wake up before this little lot!! I work 4 days and want to be a SAHM , my friend earns trillions working full full full full time and her little boy of 5 is an angel - maybe his nursery employ expensive monkeys? Personally I wouldn't want my dd in full time nursery (have brill MIL) but would NEVER judge my friend her choice, she studied and worked her arse off to get where she is, does NOT make her a mad mother. V ANGRY.

I'm not sure I'd describe my mum as "fabulous" exactly but she has always been a fiercely loyal and unselfish parent. She is definitely one of those people who was best suited to working part-time and was a much happier mum when she had a job outside the home. Without her ever making a big deal of it, I am pretty sure all the money she earned went on the rest of the family and not her own treats.
My mat leave starts when yours does, princesspeahead! Shome mishtake shurely

actually beetroot, that is a brilliant idea. Tom, if you have a college nearby that runs NNEB courses (they are all over the place), they almost always have a sort of in house placement agency that finds the students and graduates vacation work/permanent placement. You may also find a quite qualified NNEB who has a free summer (because her new job starts in sept, for example) and needs a temporary job. certainly worth a try?

actually meant bad mother...still works though...

hello olive oil, join the club! jealous about your coffee, maybe I should go and make a decaff and pretend it has caffeine in it.
Marina - free from 3 July, hurrah! When is your due date? I'm not until end Aug, but have accrued 6 weeks holiday AND am enormous AND have something slightly dodgy going on with my heart so am stopping early. can't wait, can't wait

prufrock, you are absolutely right, children do not have to be looked after tby their parents in order to receive the best care possible. many mothers are BETTER parents for working part or full time.

I care very deeply for a lot of the children I have looked after, and still remain very close to a lot of them. The baby I look after at the moment, now 14 months, was love at first sight for me, and now the whole family adore her. She gives us as much pleasure as she does her own family. They know we love her and her mother often says that she loves us too, which is wonderful to hear.

BUT, she still has that special smile and greeting when mum comes to collect her or I drop her off. Parents will always come first for children, whoever looks after them.

I often think that my children have missed out by not being looked after by someone else, they were clingy sometimes when little and were not good at being left, for instance at parties.

Children who are cared for others are often far more sociable and independent, but what do I know, I am only a monkey!!

princesspeahead, off-topic I know, but I am stopping the same day as you and due beginning August. I will be sticking my accrued leave on at the end as I have a feeling we will v. much need the money come December. Sorry to hear about your heart, do hope it is just a case of them keeping an eye on it and you taking it as easy as possible.
I must just say a quick word in defence of the monkeys who have helped me look after ds since he was 8 months old - their presence in his life has only improved it and made it happier and more sociable. They are all consummate professionals and lovely people. When disaster struck our family last summer, the nursery nurses were so compassionate and loving with ds (and supportive of us), that they helped us all through the Autumn and Winter. In the absence of much in the way of real local family support, they have become a second family to us and we make sure in all sorts of ways that they know how much we appreciate them.

And just on the crap pay issue - ahem, it's time for the F word, I'm afraid, yep, feminism. Nurses and childminders are paid comparatively badly (although I'm very pleased for you, obviously, Alibubbles) because they are - or are assumed to be - women. Who, in the glorious vicious circle of our society's assumptions, are only working for pin money, aren't they, because what women do is look after children. Calling badly paid workers 'monkeys' completely sidesteps the socio-economic background to some of this.

Incidentally, I am keeping my dd's childcare going 3 days a week while I'm on mat leave. Want to know why? Not just to give myself a break, but also because she likes the things she does with her friends and her playgroup and the people who love her. I don't want to deprive her of that.

PPH - I think you rock too, even though you don't want to be MY baby (and I did like your last moniker, it always made me think you were a Kate Winslet lookalike romping across the sunny fields with flowers in your hair).

And I can't remember how much a 4-bed house in our neck of the woods cost, but I suspect it's cheaper chez Tigermoth.