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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Person who doesn't have to pay for childcare, above, which is a huge reason kids are expensive:  what is your spouses work situation. How do you cover all the hours? I'm trying to understand how you make this work.  Seriously.  Thanks.[/quote]

Happy to answer you (though not the rest of the defensive angry crowd).

Kids are in school.  School starts at 8:30am but they can be dropped off at 8am.  It finishes at 4pm.  Husband takes them to school, I pick them up. This is a pretty identical situation to many families.

My husband is self employed and can set his own hours -- though he does work full time.  Kids both have late Sept birthday so started school before they turned 3.  Before that we worked it out on a combination of husband taking care of them (most of the time) and working during naps or when I'm home, using my employer's back up child care (a fairly common benefit), occasional childcare/babysitting swaps with other dads who had kids at home during the day, my maternity leave (I took the max x2 which is 22 weeks in DC), and my PTO.  I work for a non-profit (full time, regular full time hours) and while the salary is not great the benefits are.  I get 6 weeks PTO per year and they also offer free back up childcare for 20 days per child per year.

During the summer, their school has offered a free camp for 6 weeks in previous years.  And we use a combination of the above -- their dad, me, back up care -- plus family vacation, and 2 weeks DPR camp for $50 a week (yes, I missed this when I said we didn't pay a dime -- that's the one exception).  We may pay more for inexpensive camps in the future (say $150 a week), but I am certainly never spending $5k or 10k per summer on camps.

I've met many parents in similar situations, so I know that we're not unique.  Either one parent is self employed or freelance, or works a night shift or other non-traditional hours, or is an academic with a light teaching schedule who can fit work around school pick up and drop off -- many other combinations can make it work.  [/quote]

Neither of you has a 9-5 job, so actually a pretty unusual situation. And you seem to have sacrificed a good deal of potential income and job stability and benefits to have this arrangement. I assume your DH income would be higher if he wasn't the default parent?  You don't pay much out of pocket but there seem to be large opportunity costs you are discounting. Unless your careers are extremely self limited?[/quote]

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