Wednesday 19 November 2014

Paying the bills

Well, life is weird... I've been playing with the maths for a while now (I even found an online calculator (see the link): and it turns out that I don't earn enough to pay nursery fees for two kids... on balance, I'd be paying out over £1000/year just to go to work... and I'd need to be on 30,000 a year with a job that I could walk to just to be working for free!, So, come the new year when Sarah's career starts to get back on track (lecturing at Trent), I'll be managing the kids and the house.

In many ways I'm looking forward to it (as the kids are great and I often feel I don't get the time with them I'd like). It's going to be a brilliant adventure and I'm going to get to learn a lot from my kids.

Two things bug me... firstly, I am disappointed that, in my 30s, I'm not at the stage career/financially where there was completely free choice... it would appear that the universities I attended were rather over optimistic when discussing "graduate career trajectory" (I won't name and shame, but I'd take legal action if I thought I could win).

The second thing that bugs me is government policy... every nursery we've asked at has said "don't worry about the cost, there's tax credits". This is not true for us, our combined income would be such that we wouldn't get ANY government help. This is irritating because the nurseries all assume state help when pricing their services and we're in the zone between "low paid enough to get help" and "rich enough that it doesn't matter".

I will still be professionally active (part-time), but until September 2018, I'll probably be on my mobile or at home rather than in the office.

Monday 11 August 2014

To scale

We celebrated the kid’s 2nd birthday on Saturday with a trip to Sundown. This theme park has a lot of notoriety as my favourite location: mum never used to make it much past the lost child collection point as I’d disappear off into miniature villages where adults couldn’t and lose the tail. As a result there was a degree of trepidation as we set off.

En route we saw a car half dangling in a roadside ditch, and seeing a kiddie-seat in the back, I stopped and half-pushed, half-lifted the car back onto the road with the help of another passing motorist... the other family were lost on the way to Sundown so then we had a convoy! Once through the gates of the park, we began to explore a range of miniature and not-so-miniature challenges which the kid loved. They now have two large buildings PACKED with soft-play together with all the rides and adventures I remember from 25 years ago. I’m delighted to say that I had as much fun running round and ‘supervising’ the child as he did playing, and it was quite magical to experience the place from his perspective.

He’s started talking more lately, and the whole day was quite the action packed way to see just what he could say and communicate. He was effusive about being able to “drive” on one of the rides, and talked all through the day, only lapsing into tears once when surprised by a squirting pirate on the barrel ride. My wife has a signed copy of David Crystal’s Listen to Your Child which she refers to quite religiously and is thrilled to report that in many ways the kid is ahead of the curve linguistically... as the old line goes - getting him to be quiet is the real trick!

Part of the secret to a good day out is not just listening to the kid, but letting him have the freedom to be himself. I realised at last why Sundown was magical as a kid... everything is to scale, and whilst and adult may find the rides simplistic and the doorways challengingly small... for a child it’ probably their first experience of walking through a door their size and having information presented on their level.

DAD