This summer was extremely hard for me, much more so than previous years working from home.
The boys are that the ages where although they do love each other, given a period of time alone together they fight. They of course don’t mean to but all siblings do – this has meant that even answering the simplest of emails, or heaven forbid an actual work telephone call was made three times as long as it actually should have done.
I finished the summer feeling rather deflated, with a work to-do-list longer than the kids current Christmas wish lists and possibly a few greyer hairs thrown into the mix too.
Being a work at home mum is hard, it’s really hard.
There isn’t just the boys to look after and the housework to do, I actually do have deadlines to meet and time often isn’t on my side. School runs have to be done and when I do schedule a block of time to actually try to hit that important deadline Jacob decides that’s the day he is going to be up all night long having a party in his room rather than sleeping and come his nap time, not only is he exhausted but I am too.
Something has to give, so it’s either look into our childcare options for a couple of days a week or my sanity is set to fly out of the window pretty quickly.
I’ve started to look at childcare.co.uk and searched what is in my local area. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the site, it is a free website which has a database full of childcare options in your area. Start by choosing the type of childcare you are looking for and then add your location/postcode and a list of options will become available to you.The site has more than 1.5 million users nationwide and is the largest online community for parents in the UK having launched in 2009.
My search started with nurseries, there are 116 in the Nottingham area. Of course, not all are local to me so I am able to narrow the search by changing it within 5 miles of my house, after all, this is to make my life easier not harder by adding in a long journey to pick up and drop off as that really would be defeating the point not to mention factoring in the school run with Joshua first.
The good thing about this site is all the information I need is in the same place – I can see the contact information, whether they are Ofsted registered, the last time they updated their profile and even the availability and costs. The planner within me likes this as I can not all the information side by side in my notebook, compare and then work out which I would like to visit without it being a massive job and harder than it should be.
It also gives options such as Babysitter, Nannies, Au Pairs, Maternity Nurses and even private tutors in your local area so I can see it being a useful website to remember should we need a sitter and family not be available. Now I have seen how easy it is to use I will certainly be coming back to it again.
Armed with my notebook and a lovely list of local nurseries locally I am about to begin the process of looking around them, with Jacob ready for a new years start date for him and then hopefully a much shorter to-do-list for me in the following weeks.
Watch this space on our childcare journey!
**Collaborative post**
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