This post is a departure from the regular content, which is supposed to be "Debian and Free Software", but has accidentally turned into a hardware blog recently!

Anyway, we have a child who is now about 14 months old. The way that my wife and I care for him seems logical to us, but often amuses local people. So in the spirit of sharing this is what we do:

• We divide the day into chunks of time.
• At any given time one of us is solely responsible for him.
  • The other parent might be nearby, and might help a little.
  • But there is always a designated person who will be changing nappies, feeding, and playing at any given point in the day.
• The end.

So our weekend routine, covering Saturday and Sunday, looks like this:

• 07:00-08:00: Husband
• 08:01-13:00: Wife
• 13:01-17:00: Husband
• 17:01-18:00: Wife
• 18:01-19:30: Husband

Our child, Oiva, seems happy enough with this and he sometimes starts walking from one parent to the other at the appropriate time. But the real benefit is that each of us gets some time off - in my case I get "the morning" off, and my wife gets the afternoon off. We can hide in our bedroom, go shopping, eat cake, or do anything we like.

Week-days are similar, but with the caveat that we both have jobs. I take the morning, and the evenings, and in exchange if he wakes up overnight my wife helps him sleep and settle between 8PM-5AM, and if he wakes up later than 5AM I deal with him.

Most of the time our child sleeps through the night, but if he does wake up it tends to be in the 4:30AM/5AM timeframe. I'm "happy" to wake up at 5AM and stay up until I go to work because I'm a morning person and I tend to go to bed early these days.

Day-care is currently a complex process. There are three families with small children, and ourselves. Each day of the week one family hosts all the children, and the baby-sitter arrives there too (all the families live within a few blocks of each other).

All of the parents go to work, leaving one carer in charge of 4 babies for the day, from 08:15-16:15. On the days when we're hosting the children I greet the carer then go to work - on the days the children are at a different families house I take him there in the morning, on my way to work, and then my wife collects him in the evening.

At the moment things are a bit terrible because most of the children have been a bit sick, and the carer too. When a single child is sick it's mostly OK, unless that is the child which is supposed to be host-venue. If that child is sick we have to panic and pick another house for that day.

Unfortunately if the child-carer is sick then everybody is screwed, and one parent has to stay home from each family. I guess this is the downside compared to sending the children to public-daycare.

This is private day-care, Finnish-style. The social-services (kela) will reimburse each family €700/month if you're in such a scheme, and carers are limited to a maximum of 4 children. The net result is that prices are stable, averaging €900-€1000 per-child, per month.

(The €700 is refunded after a month or two, so in real-terms people like us pay €200-€300/month for Monday-Friday day-care. Plus a bit of beaurocracy over deciding which family is hosting, and which parents are providing food. With the size being capped, and the fees being pretty standard the carers earn €3600-€4000/month, which is a good amount. To be a school-teacher you need to be very qualified, but to do this caring is much simpler. It turns out that being an English-speaker can be a bonus too, for some families ;)

Currently our carer has a sick-note for three days, so I'm staying home today, and will likely stay tomorrow too. Then my wife will skip work on Wednesday. (We usually take it in turns but sometimes that can't happen easily.)

But all of this is due to change in the near future, because we've had too many sick days, and both of us have missed too much work.

More news on that in the future, unless I forget.

Tags: childcare, finland | 1 comment