No nanny

I don't have a nanny any more. Woo!

N3nny was super, but I was so ready to not pay all of my net salary, plus some more, to have child care. I could have had fewer nanny hours last year, but N3nny needed a certain number of hours to keep working for us, so we paid. We thought N3nny was worth it.

She was, but by the end, I was just tired of paying so much. I was also tired of some of the little things N3nny did that drove me CRAZY. I could list them, but I won't here. I tried sharing N3nny with another family, but the woman I shared with didn't always need N3nny at the same time I did so consequently, the sharing didn't reduce my costs that much (and it made it a BIG pain sometimes). So anyway, moving on...

Do I miss having a nanny? Not yet.

I'm still very much enjoying hanging with the girls, taking them to dance, doing homework while cooking dinner, and being more around. It's only been a week though--ask me again in 3 months. I'm sure I'll still enjoy it, but I may be more stressed. Right now, we're still in the honeymoon phase.

I did find someone to help on Mondays and Thursday afternoons. I will have 9 hours of nanny time a week (maybe not every week), and Three-a goes to before school care 6 hours a week. I think the cost for these two things keeps daycare less than 1/4 of the cost each week. The girls are now taking dance lessons and that adds up a bit, but adding in dance lessons for the girls only makes the total cost ~30% of what it used to be.

One thing, I'm going to be doing lots more kid-laundry. N3nny used to almost all of it. I didn't necessarily love how she did it, but I didn't complain (much), because, hey, someone was doing the laundry and it wasn't me. Clothes got stained and she'd dry things that weren't supposed to be dried.... I'd leave explicit instructions and they wouldn't get followed... (Okay, enough complaining.) It sounds silly to say, but I am excited to do their laundry (MY WAY!). I don't like putting laundry away, but the new person who will help with the girls after school will do some of the putting away, so yippee!

The one thing I'm not sure about is if I'm going to get enough hours at work with this new schedule. I'm probably going to have to either work an hour or two a night or some on the weekends to keep up. I may change my WHOLE schedule and do Zumba with a different teacher at a different time, but that's a subject for another post.... (Yea, it's shocking that I'm considering changing teachers!)