FREE??!! ECE Hours?

Yeah, I looked into the centre closer to home (low socio-economic area) but they only do ECE hrs so our next baby couldn't go there in addition to C so it just wouldn't work anyway.

DD is booked in for ECE hrs only (5hrs a day, 4 days per week - 20hrs total). Her centre provides free food (all meals - but very basic) and outings within the ECE hrs so what they are saying is that they would charge for those things if we didn't pay the optional rate and from the above, it appears that they would be within their legal rights to do so. It would roughly work out about the same in anycase, so we are just going to pay it. Its just unfortunate that in our case, the optional rate is pretty much what we are paying now barr a couple of dollars a week (because we get a high subsidy - sucky income!) So the government isn't really helping us out as a family anymore with the ECE hrs than they do already and I guess I thought it might bring it down a bit more than that

Thems the breaks - I need to keep working so that I have a job when the children are older as we really can't afford for one of us to be out of a job at any stage. Thanks very much to everyone for all the information. Ho-hum

Edited by babyg