Child care

In your experience, or opinion, would you hire a 'nanny' to come to your house 2 days a week to take care of our 18 mo/old twins (while we work) or go to a VERY nice day care center?? My mom watches them the other 3 days.

 

In your experience, or opinion, would you hire a 'nanny' to come to your house 2 days a week to take care of our 18 mo/old twins (while we work) or go to a VERY nice day care center?? My mom watches them the other 3 days.

 

I would personally have them go to a day care so they can ineract with other kids and have a different environment-so they don't get bored with being at the house all day, every day....we put ours in a home daycare and regret it a bit-they only have eachother....they are on the waiting list for the daycare at the school they will attend. My two just love others kids and are very social. Good Luck with your decision.

 

At 18 months and only 2 days a week I think a day care center would be a perfect opportunity for them to get some social interaction.

 

I would do day care center as well. Also, then you don't have to worry about someone calling in sick at the last moment. And they can probably back your mom up if she can't watch them for some reason.

 

We actually have this same situation. I come into work 4 days and we have a nanny for 2 of the days and we had an aunt for the other 2 (stress on "had"). One of the aunt's son's got his girlfriend pregnant and so besides working pt as a nurse at a hospital, she also had to watch her new grandson. It got to be too much for her and we needed to come up with another solution. I was leaning towards putting them in day care for 2 days, for the exact same reason, to get some socialization. But my dh won't hear of it until they are past 3 or able to talk and tell us if something went wrong at day care. So we ended up with a friend who has a 1 yr old, who graciously comes to our house for 2 days now, so I guess they are getting a little bit of socialization.

 

We have a nanny 4 days a week while I work but if I were in your place I would find a day care center for the other days (I have not found ANY that do part time near us). That would give them some nice interaction time. As it is now since they havea nanny during the say, I take them to an evening play group once a week and then we just started group swim class, so at least they are around other kids every week.

 

Another thing to think about is how well you can seperate from them while they are in the home.

I worked for about 6 months doing some P/T freelance work and had a sitter come in to watch them one day a week. I found it very hard to let go while they were around. The sitter was very competant and did a great job but I found myself still in "momma mode."

If I pick up any more freelance work, I will need to make myself tune them out better or send them away from the house for the time I work.

 

I am in a similar situation right now. We have a nanny come 3 days per wk, I am a SAHM.

A nanny, at least in our area, is WAAAAYYYY more expensive-for starters. We pay her $12 per hour vs $20-25 per day/per child for private day care and I dont know how much for a center.

Some bene's to daycare? Your house is clean! They get some socialization. Usually cheaper.

The downsides: Someone posted that since they dont talk at 18months, if there is a bad situation at daycare-you probably wont know. Bad influences-other children/caregivers teaching them bad "tricks". My nanny told me about some of her co-workers at a center teaching the children bad words because its "funny" to hear a child cuss..
ALso, odds are your children will get sick more due to being around more children. Less convenient. And finally, I would say if you cant miss work due to ill children-go with a private nanny.

We will stick with our nanny, although I would love to fire her about 80% of the time....

Make sure if you hire a nanny to get a binder with DAILY TASK SHEETS that she CHECKS OFF DAILY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WIth any rules you have CLEARLY POSTED!!!!!!!!

Good luck!