Looking ahead to maternity leave with a child in school...
Hello all!
It's been a while since i've been on here but this site was so important to me while expecting DD! So I thought I'd ask you lovely people if any of you have any advice or experiences based on this.
I work 30 miles away from home. DD's child care has been split between my parents (2 days a week) and chilkd minders really local to my work. She's now in part time nursery, going to full time next January once she's 4, again in a school close to my work. It's all great, it all works. But we ARE planning on a 2nd LO (probably looking to try in a year and halfs time).
I had 6 months maternity leave with DD, and that amount of time worked great for us. So if I guess that I'd be off for the same amount of time, that's 6 months of school runs to a school 30 miles away!! DH works in the opposite direction, and my parents are the opposite direction too (and the in laws live over 150 miles away so that isn't an option either!). I can't see it being at all possible to do a 60 mile round trip to take her and the same later in the day to pick her up - madness! And taking her, killing time during the day, and then bringing home 5 days a week wouldn't work with a newborn either!!
I don't want to more her perminantly to a school closer to home because 1) the current system with her being so close to my work works really well the rest of the time, and 2) we don't know where we'll be living! (We're hoping to move around the same time - madness I know!).
The ideal would be that we could move close to where I work / where she's in school, but housing costs in that area will probably write that off. Or the other ideal would be that I could move her to a more local school for 6 months and then back to her old school!! But I'm sure that's not aloud!?! Is it?!
Has anyone else experienced this dilema? What did you do? Any thoughts?!
Thank you all in advance!
Clare
Replies
Lol thanks for your reply! It's difficult isn't it. We can't really afford to move any earlier than that, which is half the problem. I also can't afford to reduce my hours - to be fair, work are great and I can do flexi working of sorts (which allows me to currently drop her off at nursery int he morning the 3 mornings she goes - child minders pick her up and have her the rest of the day, she's with my mum the other two full days) but having her local to home long term would cause more problems I think. At the moment, being so close to her school means that if there's a concert, parents evening, or if she's ill, I can pop there really quickly. If she was closer to home, it would be a 40 min drive!
So difficult!! lol
Clare
I'd be very interested to hear if anyone else had this type of problem and what they did. Happy to be convinced either way!
Clare