One option I never considered is placing Klara in an at-home arrangement of the kind where a woman looks after several kids in her house. I’m not condemning the people who do use this form of care in any way but it’s something that is not for me.
The people who can work inside their homes and still act as professionals in a job are extremely rare. Going from the home persona to the job persona while staying in the same place, the same clothes, the same everything is extraordinarily hard. I know I can’t do it. If your job consists of reaching out to the world (through phone calls, Skype, etc), that might help. Otherwise, I don’t see it for anybody but people who compartmentalize to a degree not normally encountered among humans.
Some people might actually prefer a carer who positions herself not as an employee providing services but as an acquaintance providing help but for me that’s uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel honest because I don’t pay friends. And if I do pay for work done or get paid, our relationship has mutated to something other than friendship.
Clarissa's Blog 
For a few years my brother and I were in such a situation because both our parents were working. There was no such thing then really as “day care” just the occasional woman who took in other people’s kids in working hours (and forget anything like regulation or certification).
This being small town cracker Florida….. it was an experience. We’ll call the woman Agnes Brown and everybody in town called her house by her name “Over at Agnes Brown’s”. She was married but her husband was not, really, employed, not really and he was around a lot of the time and spent a lot of that time in screaming arguments with his wife or trying to get drunk “Don’t tell Agnes!” he’d say as he pulled a bottle from under the house (this was an old time Florida house set above the ground on short pillar things and we spent a lot of time crawling around in the dirt underneath the house looking for “stuff”.
Agnes had her own kids (this being cracker florida I’m pretty sure that one or more ended up in prison) and half the kids in the neighborhood (whose mothers weren’t working) would come over to spend part or all of the day and it was noisy and chaotic and probably dangerous and it would make somebody with modern standards faint but I have to say I didn’t mind at the time. There was always something going on and it was never boring.
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Well, obviously you survived “cracker” Florida without any apparent damage.
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” “cracker” Florida ”
No need for scare quotes. Cracker is the self-designation of whites born and raised in non-tourist Florida (and who have something like roots there). It’s not at all offensive. The term is offensive in other states where it means something like ‘white trash’ and maybe in the use of non-white Floridians but not to Florida crackers themselves
“without any apparent damage.”
Nobody gets out of cracker Florida with no damage. It’s only a question of degree and visibility….
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Child minders are increasingly common in the UK, and it is reassuring that the home will have been inspected before they can start this work, so parents aren’t the ones having to negotiate safety standards. The only ones I would have considered are those I had already met, say at parent and toddler groups, and had seen interact with children myself.
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The daycare-in-home arrangement was very helpful to my family and may others when I was a graduate student. It was mutually beneficial to the providers and the customers. I found the experience really positive. It cost a flat $20 a week (about $100 to $120 in today’s dollars I expect.)
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I’d rather quit my job and so would my husband than go this route. I’m sure it works for some people but not for us.
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