Related Posts
More Posts
Conversation Starter
If you have cash that you want to invest. Please consider Treasury Series I Savings Bond (Electronic). Interest is 7.12% right now. While it's not guaranteed that the 7.12% will remain until next year, it's still a good deal.
My SO and I just invested 20k (10k max per person even married).
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_ibonds_glance.htm
New to Fishbowl?
Download the Fishbowl app to
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
We couldn’t watch my son and work from home safely. He’s starting to walk and needs a lot of supervision. We looked at daycares but they all close at 6 so that wouldn’t work for us. So we ended up hiring a nanny and she’s been amazing. It stretches our budget but it’s only for a couple years until he starts school. It’s been 100% worth the money to make sure we can focus at our jobs and that he’s well taken care of.
I found my nanny on Care.com after interviewing like 10 different ones. My office has a 3 hour time difference from where I live so I was able to watch my daughter in the mornings and have my nanny come when I start work at noon and then when my husband gets home from work at 6 he releases her. My advice is to try to overlap your schedule and with your husband as much as possible. One of you starts early and ends early and the other starts late and ends late. That way you limit the number of hours your nanny works. The other thing I did was I advertised the position as only taking care of my kid (no cleaning, no cooking, no errands, holidays off) to justify a lower rate. Obviously there will be days where you’ll need your nanny to come in early, be upfront about that. We use Google sheets to communicate hours with her. If I know I have an early meeting a week before, I update the sheet accordingly. And whenever I’m done with work early, I release my nanny early. My husband and I work really hard to keep her hours low and therefore keep costs down. We absolutely love our nanny. She’s become a part of the family and loves how flexible we are (we give her lots of leeway because I WFH and can swing it here and there). She also loves that it’s a pretty low key job. All she’s expected to do is come in and play with my kid.
I was a daycare mom pre-pandemic if you want to chat. Now we wing it at home. Also in NYC.
Impossible for me. I’m a daycare mom. The thought of doing taxes, vacation, raises, all the admin work of a nanny on top of my busy schedule totally turned me off. I know there are companies to help with that but it drives the cost up even more. Not trying to convince you to do daycare but talking with other moms at the daycare we chose helped ease those concerns. Trust they don’t go away but it gets easier. My kids thrived at daycare and they were able to get much more attention than I would’ve been able to give them while juggling meetings and managing a team. The good daycares are worth it. Happy to answer any questions if you have any.
I did daycare as a Senior Art Director through Art Supervisor in NYC. It’s expensive but was worth it for me since they took care of breakfast, lunch and snacktime. Also changing diapers and potty training was done by them. In addition, my daycare provided a stimulating and engaging day for their development and now that they are doing well at school age I have no regrets. I don’t think I could wing those things while working. At some point something is only getting half-done.
I think it’s only possible to wing it now because of the pandemic. I’ve been a remote employee for many years and pre covid it was not acceptable to have your kid barging in or breaking up the work day. I expect at some point this will become the expectation again, but for now we continue to get a reprieve. Also, it gets harder to wing it the older the kid gets. Once they are mobile, all bets are off. What will you do if you both have client calls at the same time, for example? Many parents turn to the screen but that’s not ideal for an ongoing solution.
We have a nanny from 9 to 5 to watch over our infant while we work from home. We’re in NYC as well, and while it’s the most expensive thing we’ve done in our lives, it’s working out well and we just couldn’t have winged it because my husband and I are both CDs with intense days. The nanny has been great at getting the baby on a routine, advising us on her growth and calming our first-time parent fears. Having said that, we are considering moving to daycare when the baby turns 1, so she can benefit from more activities and social interaction.
Mine is the exact same age! I quickly learned to be firm about boundaries - I block my calendar from 5-8, and sometimes spend an hour or so finishing up work after the baby is asleep. Of course, meetings after 5 occasionally do come up, and my husband and I have decided that we need to check with the other if we’re accepting one of those. It’s working fine so far - but a lot of it is because we’re remote, and I feel valued and secure at my current job. I’m nervous about how I’m going to handle it if we go back into the office, or if I switch agencies.
I went through a nanny service for one many that we had for 5+ years (18 months to 7!) and it was so worth it. No rushing home, snow day coverage, meal prep, grocery shopping, laundry! We added more stuff once the kid was in school in order to keep her hours enough for her. Then she had a kid if her own and we didn’t looked at care.com and an agency again. The agency sent people who were a little too hard core professional nanny for us and I ended up reaching out myself to a profile on care.com. She was our nanny for 7-12 and is still a nanny for friends.
Best decisions ever. Met some wonderful women who are still in our lives.
If you have room an Au pair can be an affordable and less complicated option. I used EF Au pair.
Have you considered a nanny share? Where in the city are you located - a lot of neighborhoods have Facebook mom (parent) groups and you could try posting or connecting with another local family there. It’s cheaper than daycare and has a social component for the kiddo. Perhaps you and your partner can split the work of finding/ coordinating (plus in the case of a nanny share, theoretically 4 adults to divide and conquer).
To be honest, a nanny share is way more work than getting a nanny for your family. Having to align on everything for the kids and nanny with another family is very time consuming (and when it’s not aligned, emotionally draining).
Nanny shares!
Unless you have a decent amount of space, the nanny situation at home is tough. Nanny won’t love having you around all day, and it’s even worse if she has to try to keep everything quiet when you’re on calls. So much drama with nannies, sick days, snow days, wanting more from you. I’d go daycare all the way. They are always open, even if someone calls in sick.
Sorry, to answer your question more directly, it’s extremely tough to wing it. I tried it and felt like I was failing at both jobs, all the time.
I tried working without a nanny twice. I felt so spread thin and felt like I was half-assing everything in my life. I finally found a nanny/housekeeper hybrid and it is the best money I spend each week. My home is clean, meals are cooked for me, my son is well taken care of, and I now have time to focus on my family when I’m not working. It’s quite a more $ than I’d like to spend, but everyone is less stressed out and I can’t put a price tag on that.