That would indeed be ideal, but unfortunately I know a lot of people don't have control over their schedules like that. I know my husband and I tried that early in our marriage, but his employer was not flexible like that. Since he generally worked nights, I took a part-time day job that was walking distance from our apartment. I thought it would be perfect. But his boss wrote their schedule on a weekly basis, and there was no guarantee what shift he would get, or even how many hours. (He requested full time but was only guaranteed 30-40 hours). So the weeks he got only 30... were hard on the finances. She did not accommodate his requests for consistency in scheduling, and so our schedules would often overlap. If you didn't want to be called in for a certain period of day, then you had to request it as vacation time or lose those hours. So there would literally be a 2-hour "overlap" in our schedules once or twice a week, and that made it impossible to have round-the-clock care for our newborn. So we couldn't both work. I quit because he found another job and we had to move.
So I've pretty much been waiting to find a job where we could have alternating schedules, or that would pay enough to justify daycare. This is the first one. I work on a contractual basis, and there isn't much work in the winter, so I've had to hire babysitters so far. None of the daycare centers accept kids sporadically! But that also means I haven't really faced the challenges of two working parents yet. We shall see how it goes this summer...
