Growing realisation of issues with Emily

Sue picked Em up from Helen's tonight utterly dismayed. Apparently Helen had to dry Emily's clothes in the dryer as they were wet from her weeing herself. The obvious question - how often did you take her to the toilet? - was met with a response akin to "I was too busy" (apparently she's got a full house with it being half term).

This incident just really hit home that Em isn't getting the right "experience" (if that's the right term) going to Helen's. She doesn't need an obviously over-stretched childminder neglecting her bladder needs resulting in a heavy nappy and wet clothes.

Sue and I are seriously having to rethink our strategy with regards to Emily. I don't really know if a childminder who specialises in special needs kids is available in our area. Given the issues with someone like Em, I can imagine if there was they'd have a very low child to childminder ratio, thus increasing the cost exponentially.

Emily is special needs - there's no getting around that - and we need to address this with increased special needs-related services for her. A one childminder fits all approach obviously isn't working and I really don't know what the solution is - logistically, personally, financially.

Even taking a full time position to look after Em wouldn't be the best solution as we aren't trained or equipped to facilitate her needs fully.

The mind continues to boggle.

Child minding issues. Continued.

With our previous child minder out of action for a bit, we are now currently searching for new services.

Thankfully, we have a stop gap in my aunt, so we can search with a bit more leeway and not take the first child minder that comes along.

We have the first appointment tomorrow around noon with a woman who lives around the corner from us in Wallington. Bonus point here - it's on the WAY to work, not 25 minutes the other way.

I imagine we have a wonderful few weeks of interviews, reference checking and other sundry vetting ahead of us. Oh happy days.

Child minding issues

For reasons I won't be going into we've suddenly found ourselves child minderless. Having processed this information last night, I was trying to find the silver lining to the cloud. The only one really being that Sue and I might be able to source one a little closer / more convenient to my work.

I did a cursory look around NetMums last night and there seems to be a few choices out there. It's just a question of narrowing down, contacting, checking references, etc. Not something we can really do tomorrow and Friday.

Up until this point, I was happy to drive Emily in completely the wrong direction from work as we were completely happy with our child minder and didn't want to uproot Emily from what had become her routine. How fate intervenes.

Today Emily is in emergency childcare at Deutsche Bank and Sue doesn't plan on repeating the trip any time soon, as Emily is getting to the age where her attention span is short and her means of letting you know this quite vocal.

Hopefully we'll have an option surface that will afford us a bit of breathing room. Today I'm feeling all sorts of odd, as I guess it's hitting me that Emily is actually child minderless and we really have no light at the end of the tunnel yet.

Child minding

We've taken Em to the DB child care centre a couple of times and to be honest it's a nightmare (getting everyone ready at the same time, fighting for a spot on the commuter train, Em coming down with the green groolies, etc.)

We've sat down, worked out the figures and decided we're now going to try a local approach.

There's a woman in Carshalton that does child minding and for the time being, we're going to be dropping Em off there every morning and picking her up every evening.

Having had a year off - almost - and never really being apart from Em, Sue's in two minds over what to do, childminding-wise. The obvious choice - quit her job and stay at home - really isn't financially viable. Sue's other option is flexi-time, working 4 days a week.

Over the last 9 months, Sue's not only got incredibly fond of the bond she's formed with Em, not having to endure commuting, or office politics, she's also made friends with local mums - most of whom are going back either part time or flexi-time. Part of Sue's reasoning for flexi-time - the main being spending as much time with Em as possible - is to maintain social ties with the local mums.

Come February, I imagine it'll be quite a lot of trial and error in the beginning, with a few late arrivals at work, or seperation anxiety attacks by Em (and Sue).

I think as far as the natural progression of life goes, this has to happen at some point. I know from my experience it just didn't happen this early, and if we could afford it, it wouldn't with Em either.

Child care worries

Anyone reading this with any regularity will know that I am racked with a huge amount and number of worried about our impending bubby.

Some of them are about the health, nature and future of our child and others are about how we will cope.

Touching on the second, I received an email from Fool.co.uk today with an interesting article on the cost of child care.

It doesn't really say much we didn't know except that the cost of caring for a child is going up probably faster than anyone's pay. While this is good for the child carers, people WITH children aren't millionaires so we need a happy medium.

The article also discussed the Childcare Vouchers Scheme which Sue and I will probably be eager to take up.

Still not sure how we're going to drop off / pick up bubby with our horrible work schedule. The article didn't touch on that.