I'm having a Nanny 9-1-1 moment, but not because my child is behaving poorly.

I paid daycare this morning. I know it's Friday and not Monday, but we're not going to be here on Mon-Wed next week, so I thought I'd get a head start on it and pay today. The rate had gone up, but only by $8 per week. Not too shabby, eh? Except that translates to $416 a year, times who knows how many kids are there. Oh, and that brings our weekly bill to $265. That's right, folks. My husband and I spend more on daycare than we do on our mortgage.

Let me break it down for you. $265 per week is $13,780 per year. We spend almost forteen THOUSAND dollars per year on child care. I take that back. We get 16 days per year that we don't have to pay ($848), so really, it's only thirteen THOUSAND dollars per year. For child care.

On my walk into work this morning, I longed for the time, not long ago, when I was paying $125 per week for my daughter's care. I thought it was expensive. I knew that it was slightly below national average at the time for pre-school aged care (national average was $7,000 per year, and I was paying roughly $6,500), but still. As a single mom making not quite $40k, spending 16% of it on daycare seemed like a lot. That was only 5 years ago. What has happened since then that it's suddenly OK to pay twice that for the same service? I mean, other than a recession in which millions of people are out of work.

You hear people piss and moan all the time about the tuition rates at our colleges and universities. Well, how about the rates at our first learning centers? Just look at the university I went to. Total expenses for a year is roughly twice what I paid when I went there..wait for it...17 years ago. That's outrageous. But how about if it doubled every five? Don't get me wrong. I understand the importance of good child care. I'm (obviously) willing to pay for good child care. I'm just not sure how I went from struggling to pay 16% of my income on it to paying 20% of my income on the same thing. In a time when people all over are tightening their belts, it's really difficult to justify paying more for necessary services. My family can always cut cable or buy generic groceries, etc. But quality care is a necessity for us to continue to work, and the pace of our cost of living pay increases is not in keeping with the increase in costs of living.  I really shouldn't complain.  We're only $56,000 away from kindergarten and an end to this madness.