The Cost of Summer Child Care

Baby Ripples goes to day care 4 days a week throughout the year.  We are lucky that our school's switched over to all day Kindergarten this year, so we only had 1 child in day care throughout this past school year.  But now that school is almost out for the year, we had to start planning on what we would be doing with the girls for the summer.  My first thought was to send both the girls to the day care four days a week.  Then I added up the cost.  For 2 kids, even with the second child discount, it would cost us $253 a week for four days of child care or about $1,012 per month. 

If we had to, we could handle that since its only for 3 months.  But I definitely don't want to have to spend that much.  We have a lot of fun things that we want to do this summer and spending that much on daycare would mean we would have to cut back in other ways.

Luckily my mother-in-law and step-father are both retired and have offered to help.  My husband and I work different shifts so some days we only really need child care for a couple of hours where our schedules over lap.  So my mother-in-law is taking one morning and my step-father is taking another morning.  So now we only need to take the girls to day care 2 days a week during the summer costing us $133.50 per week or about $534 per month.  That is much better!