Childcare > House Payment!!???

Its probably a fact of life that childcare CAN cost an arm, leg, or a small mortgage, but today's tour of a Daycare in Leawood had us shocked! We won't name it, but it rhymes with "Cram-The La-Cram", and you can probably guess from the city name too! Tuition (yes, I love that euphemism too.) costs about $1,700 (Yes, you read it right) per month for a newborn!!??

So the question becomes, what does $1,700 a month buy you in daycare services? Well, i will have to admit you get what you pay for... except in a more gold-plated way. Instead of a boring building with normal children rooms, you get Disneyland. Seriously, walk through the front door, and i swear you'll see a rainforest kampung to your right, a castle on a hill on your left, and a quiant row of cobblestoned french shoppes in front of you... Doubt it'll impress a newborn, but it sure impressed me! Almost expected Mickey Mouse to jump out from behind the bushes and tacke us!

So, we did some quick math, and kinda figured the following: Newborns sleeps on average 18 hrs a day, roughly 75% of the time. Realistically, she'll spend at most 10 hrs in daycare. So for 2.5 waking hrs a day X 20 business days = 50hrs @ 1,700. That comes out to $34/hr for each waking moment in daycare. For $34/hr she'd better be stimulated with all kinds of toys known to man. They should put a Babies R Us IN the Daycare, and give her all the toys that she can lay her hands on. Heck, she better not drop any Zzzzs over there at all, hate to pay all that $$ for someone to watch her sleep!!??

Then it occured to us that $1,700 is actually MORE than our current mortgage today! So, let me put it another way. For $1,700, we can afford a $280,000 house in KC!! Here's just a few selections in that price range. Definitely an upgrade from our little shack in West Olathe!

OR... maybe we just are out of our league Daycare pricing wise. :) Seriously, those kids over there look like they're LOVED to death over there. Those parents are probably getting every penny's worth of their money in attention. We'll keep looking, but Childcare > house Payment? , not our style...

Some baby humor

Got the following pictures courtesy of Steve K. Thought a little baby humor might be the right thing for us to-be parents. Enjoy!

Denied! By a Charity....

Thought that we'd get a two-fer today via dropping off some old stuff (Clothes, shoes, electronics) at the local charity today. You know, Goodwill gets some stuff that they can reuse/resell for the homeless and needy, and I get rid of stuff thats sitting in my garage and a nice tax break as well. ....Or at least, that was the idea. Instead, Goodwill had other ideas.

They gladly took the clothes and the shoes, but DENIED to take my old computer monitor??!! I gotta say, I'm sure in the year 2008, the homeless and needy might have gotten a lot more sophisticated than pre-Y2K, but "your monitor is too old"!!??? Thats news to me! DENIED by a charity, that probably ranks as one of my more perpelxed moments of my life.... Oh Well, the monitor now goes into the trash, at least I tried to do the charitable thing....

Happy Chinese New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year of the RAT to All! Especially so for the rest of the Malaysian transplants in the non-Asian regions of the world. Really hard to get in the mood for us in the Mid-west when everthing we've been hearing for the last couple of days was Super-Tuesday! Which, incidentally has absolutely nothing to do with CNY! We're saving up our celebrations with our in-town friends this Friday with a small dinner, and joining another larger CNY celebration dinner Saturday night. Don't plan to take any of the next couple of days off either, with the rest of the country not recognizing our holiday as a public holiday... taking days off to celebrate will only net us a couple of days staring at the wall... or maybe with election going on here, watching the pundits debate the old Republican vs Democrat talking point! In any case, for the rest of the billions of Chinese people like us around the world, HAPPY NEW YEAR OF THE RAT!