As people said, daycare is very regional. My state is one of the strictest with ratios. Very few daycares take infants because they can take two toddlers vs one infant and make more money.

That being said, my area generally has a small drop to toddlers, but $175 is about the going rate. In my opinion, if you like the daycare Id stick with the $175, your paying for a service and don't want her to cut back on quality of the service. Again in my area daycare is hard to find so once your in a good daycare you do what you need to to stay in there.

You or her dropped dropped out of a 200K a year job... yikers... You obviously made it. We had planned on it for several years, so lived off one income, sized house to one income. //

Well we have not made it yet, at least to the finish line. Kids are 6, 3 and 3, so we have a long way to go. My wife if she had stayed in Law, would be partner by now making close to a million maybe, but of course we would have never met, had time to date, or gotten married if she went down that path. Being a lawyer at her level back then was a complete time suck and it had a runway of at least 10 years to partner. It is very difficult for us, she can work part time on the computer these days, I got a little pension and I put on some camps with Dan. I have to put on a bunch more camps nowadays just to make ends meet. Really good thing I was a saver most of my life, but starting to dip into rainy day funds already and may have to make some hard decisions in a few years. But such is life, just need to stay healthy, keep the family that way and I'm not going to complain about my lot. Better than most, that is for sure...


Of course there are those lottery tickets in my wallet every time it goes over 200 million, is that even a plan?? (-;

We're at $185/week for a 4 year old, and we provide her lunches and snacks. The rate you're paying wouldn't be as much of a concern to me as the days off. We haven't done a formal in-home day care, but shared a nanny with some friends, she was at their house 3 days a week, 2 at ours (their kids didn't come to ours, but ours went to theirs). While the rate was great, we had a significant problem with the days off. It was sometimes unpredictable, conflicted with our work meetings and available vacation/personal days when she'd take a "personal" day or needed to have days off for her own teenage kids, etc. We switched to a traditional day care, which is right around the same rate as you're paying, gets our daughter out of the house, has far nicer facilities than an in-home (but, to be fair, we did one in home for a while that was awesome until she switched careers, but still around the same rate), and the best thing is that it's fully predictable. They're closed only on the normal holidays and a couple of scheduled days a year outside of that, so I think 5 total days, 3 or 4 of which are days off for me anyway. We have a "free" week where we don't have to pay if we're on vacation or something, rather than us paying someone when they're on vacation. If someone at the facility is ill, they have it covered with other people helping in the room. It's only closed on a very rare occasion, always because of extreme weather when the schools are also closed, but they close less often than the schools (we're in Michigan, where the winters can be extreme). I'd just go for a traditional day care and not have the 29 days off to deal with. And we don't have to pay for pre-school in addition since she's in a really nice facility that integrates a full pre-school curricula as part of the package.

Damn. That's insane. We're less than half of that for our 4 year old, excited about it decreasing to just the cost of after school care this autumn when she's in young 5s/pre-kindergarten. We paid a cash-rate, pay-up-front flat $1400 for 3 months of full time summer care for our 7 year old at the same facility. It's going to be nice to have them both in school and down to 3 days of after school care only for the younger one and then summer care for both. It will be like getting a mortgage payment back...which I'd like to use to get out of having a mortgage payment in 5 years.

And I dont think I saw it anywhere in the thread here, but the YMCA in our area offers after school and full day care at a pretty reasonable rate. I see about 1/3 of the kids from my 1st graders class go to the Y at 2pm, probably til 5 or 6 when the parents get off work. We did that last year when kindergarten was a 1/2 only, think about $350 a month for the 5 days a week, super reasonable..

Our daycare drops the price for each year between infant and age 5.

I'd love to get $175/week for a toddler.

Our place dropped the rate around $50/week on shift from infant-(ish) to toddler (price dropped when kid turned 15 months).

I had both of my kids overlapped in daycare for 1 year. It was a little over $2,700/month. That hurt. My job doesn’t offer health insurance, we go through my wife’s insurance, otherwise my wife may have stayed home. Luckily, it’s my sons last year.

My daughter goes to the local YMCA for aftercare and between the membership dues and aftercare it’s about $400/month. Not to mention, they will both be going to day camp this summer which is $11,000 for both of them.

It’s depressing that I pay so much to have someone else raise my kids.

Home care? Or a child mill? ;-)

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

In honor of Duffy, "you're such a binary thinker - I'm done with you" :)

It's a multi-state, fairly corporate daycare chain. If that's what you consider a 'child mill', then I guess it's closer to that than home care.

Every single facility based daycare that we looked into had a discount once the child moved out of the infant room. In our case the monthly change was ~$300/month ($1950 to $1650) I think. I am not entirely positive but I believe laws require a 4 to 1 child/teacher ratio and once you move into the older rooms it goes up to 5 to 1. The work is far more manageable as they get older. They can feed themselves, they become potty trained. Their motor skills are more developed requiring less constant attention. Infant rooms tend to be more controlled environments, no outside shoes allowed, etc.

That said, home based daycares probably shoot from the hip a lot more.

Yes I have learned that. We never looked into facility day cares only home care.

Home care providers generally do not lower the price.

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

Around here at least, home based care is often cheaper than a daycare, so maybe it evens out in the end?