[speaker001:] child care seems to be uh a uh a topic that varies I guess with where you are geographically if you're in an area where you got a lot to select from then I guess there are a lot of criterias to choose from but if you're in an area where there's two or three then uh you get what you can take
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] and I guess it'd depend on the the age of the child the needs of the child how long the child has to be there if it's a five day a week deal I would certainly look a lot harder than if it was just a couple of days a month
[speaker002:] oh yeah
[speaker001:] and uh we're in a situation where it's just one maybe two days a month uh at best so we're
[speaker002:] well that's lucky
[speaker001:] in only a couple of hours usually what we use them for now is to transport between school and and uh the day care center and have them wait there just long enough for me to get off work and go pick them up
[speaker002:] yeah that's good
[speaker001:] so it's nice to uh to just have them there for the limited time frame but the uh the drawback is the pay structures there's so many different situations that these day care centers have to get into they have a lot of the ones have just decided that they will simplify their work load by saying if you get on the bus to ride between school and day care you'll pay ten dollars regardless of whether you road one way or both ways and regardless of whether you stayed there just half an hour or three hours
[speaker002:] um-hum oh
[speaker001:] they just averaged it all out but most kids stay until about six so it will be about ten dollars which will cover the ride and cover the hours you stay
[speaker002:] wow yeah
[speaker001:] and I've got uh one kid getting out at two forty five and one getting out at three thirty so the one gets picked up at two forty five gets there by about three
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] and I'm there a little before four o'clock to pick them up so he doesn't stay there even an hour and the other child is not even there when I get there and doesn't get there until about four it's about thirty minutes to do a ten minute ride in there little bus and
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] so the you know just for the doesn't really work out for us too economical to pay twenty dollars for a one way bus ride for these two kids but some days we have to do it some days it just works out to where I don't get into work early enough to get off
[speaker002:] yeah I can see that
[speaker001:] early enough to get them but uh fortunately the other end of the deal is some days my wife uh
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] being a dental hygienist works by appointments so she if she has a day scheduled where she has to get the kids into the day care to of them take them to school and she has uh a
[speaker002:] yeah right
[speaker001:] an appointment say at eight thirty and she has to be all the way across town at her office at eight thirty then she needs to have them ride the bus one way and I'll get off in time to hopefully pick both of them up and not have the day care center in the other direction but uh just a myriad of of possibilities that these people have to serve so they have a myriad of pay structures but uh it it can get expensive most of them run uh
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] four some as many as five dollars an hour per child for uh what we call drop in care which is the situation we're in we're not a regular so the days we do use them we pay through the nose and uh
[speaker002:] yeah oh I bet
[speaker001:] and make their kids stay there we found on in the area that that is letting us pay as little as two fifty an hour that's still five dollars an hour for two of our kids and it it's uh fun we try to keep it to a minimum
[speaker002:] yeah I bet yeah I you'd have to
[speaker001:] yeah it's
[speaker002:] uh I when when I uh I I I was I was a commercial artist for almost six years before um we started our family and I looked into uh into child care and and we were living in we were living in Dallas my husband was working at the North building at the time and we just didn't like anything we saw we really I didn't want to leave an infant
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] with the child care that was in it the immediate area
[speaker001:] right
[speaker002:] that we were we were located in so we uh we tightened some belt
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] belt loops and uh I just I decided to stay home with with her and we're we're expecting our second child any day now in fact I'm past due well so so I just so we've been real pleased that our that that I that I haven't to to use the we haven't had to use day care but because what we found we just didn't like at all
[speaker001:] yeah well even if you work out the economics if you get over all the other hurdles of the ratio of of workers to uh kids and uh the uh infant worker uh worker areas how well that's closed off or how not well that's closed off from the other noise
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] uh once you get over all the other hurdles just the economics of it uh it's not as much of an impact to stay home as it were if you figure in what it would cost you to go back to work and you know the
[speaker002:] right oh right that's exactly what it was with us it was just it was uh we all we had to do was we pay off a vehicle early and then I would have just been paying for for that and and child care was my uh salary and it wasn't worth it
[speaker001:] yep that that's it
[speaker002:] so it was
[speaker001:] of course you couldn't have known two to three years ago when you were making this decision what the taxes were going to do now the child care what you do pay doesn't not even worth a hill of beans on your tax return can't deduct it so what's it good for
[speaker002:] no it's not
[speaker001:] so it's it's gotten it's changed a little bit over the years but uh
[speaker002:] yeah uh it is so expensive down here for a child care because we're originally from Missouri Missouri and most and of our family's still there and uh my husband's sisters have their kids in child care and it's a lot less expensive then it is down here
[speaker001:] um-hum right
[speaker002:] it's um it's it's amazingly less expensive than it is
[speaker001:] well what the market can bear and
[speaker002:] yeah oh it oh yeah
[speaker001:] and boy there are kids in this this little section of Plano that we're in we're surrounded less than a mile we have six different centers to our at our disposal so
[speaker002:] wow
[speaker001:] we can go north to two of them or south to three of them or just over west a little bit further and there's two more over there there's just all around us but and we've been to everyone of them over the time
[speaker002:] well that's lucky
[speaker001:] but the kids uh the kids just well we used to use them a little more than we do now that they're in school and the kids just kind of get tired of them
[speaker002:] that's lucky uh-huh
[speaker001:] they get tired of the uh you know what's available to play on and uh and what's outside and and plus they they tend to just shift around in in who runs them for a while and the uh pay structure changes and
[speaker002:] really
[speaker001:] so we've just moved with wherever's it happens to be cheapest and they happen to want to survive at and they want to live at this one for a while
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] and uh we found it cheaper even during the summer for me to uh take off for half a day since we work a four and a half day work week and come home on these Thursdays that she goes to work at uh eleven and get's off at seven thirty at night
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] and that she does that on Thursdays and then occasional Saturday's and I can take off on those Thursday's and be home in time to for her to go off to work and it's cheaper for me to do that and take my vacation even if I uh
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] take all thirteen weeks of summer that's less than uh right at a weeks full full uh full week's worth of vacation and I have you know three weeks a year I been long enough to do that
[speaker002:] wow yeah
[speaker001:] now I always end up in a must take situation anyway so
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] we decided to eat it up that way and still take a week off and still have a few days to for whatever week long weekends or the like and I think we're going to do that again this summer like we did last summer because we paid close to seven or eight hundred dollars just to have someone come into the home at a couple a dollars an hour to take care of them on those Thursdays throughout the summer so
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] it it's hard to to find the prices I guess that does seem to be one of the major driving factors
[speaker002:] I know oh it is it it it plus plus um when we were in in the section of uh North Dallas over by Addison there's just not hardly any day care over there at all it's surprising
[speaker001:] um yeah
[speaker002:] because of the when I was searching for it the best the best place I could find in the was down in Farmers Branch and I worked in Carrollton it just and I was I was going to have to drive and drive and drive and and it was just it was just really
[speaker001:] oh boy
[speaker002:] there were just so many strikes against it but uh like up here in McKinney there's there's a few places there's like I think there's I've seen two up here
[speaker001:] um
[speaker002:] and there's just really not very much
[speaker001:] well I guess they haven't had the I don't know what the incentive would be but um I guess with all the ones around the Plano area and figuring that most of them drive south for their jobs maybe they maybe they've done it that way and going with that logic
[speaker002:] that's true oh yeah a lot of people drive into Dallas from here a lots of them
[speaker001:] yeah it must be on what they're counting on
[speaker002:] so yeah yeah I I I assume so
[speaker001:] hum well uh speaking of kids I've got one hollering at me so I better head on we'll
[speaker002:] okay okay well nice talking to you bye bye
[speaker001:] cross paths later um bye