Childcare options!

I used home based care when Ella was 6 months- 13 months and have now just moved her to daycare (just 2 days a week). I loved home based care and found it was really good for Ella when she was a little baby as she got more one-on-one attention and had a good relationship with just one carer. It also worked out very cost effective as we paid $4.80 an hr (we supplied food,nappies etc). The down side to home based carer is that sometimes the carer was unable to look after her due to sickness (either the carer was sick or one of her 2 children was). This is main reason why I moved Ella to daycare as it was getting a little bit unreliablable (sp) and also I felt that Ella was really to go into daycare and get a bit more socialisation. She has been there 1 week and settled in soooo quickly and I think actually being in homebased care helped the transitation. Cost wise, daycare is more expensive...because we are only part-time we pay $65 a day (includes food and nappies)(the ones I look at ranged from $56-70 a day). I am pretty sure most daycares do offer a discount for siblings- from memory I think it is around 10%, but may vary. 

I am not sure what we will do when we have 2 kids....but doing the sums on our current wage there isn't much point in sending 2 to daycare (even if I work full time, which I am dead set against)....so I think we will look at a mixture of home based care and kindy.