You know how it is when something seems too good to be true? That bit about how it normally is too good to be true? Yes, well. That.

This morning, I went to see the nursery to which we were proposing to send the witchling come June and my inescapable return to work (well, inescapable unless we stump up the £6k we would thus owe them in university maternity pay). Quercus went last week, liked it, talked to them, asked lots of questions, checked availability, and registered her accordingly. Except they lied to him. They didn’t check the all-powerful ‘forward planner’, known to us mere mortals as ‘diary’. It’s all bollocks: not only can they not take her for our preferred working pattern (five mornings a week), but they can’t even manage our fallback pattern, by quite some distance. Like, three days a week kinda distance. So, effectively we’re back to square one.

On Monday I go to see another nursery, one which Quercus said was happy to take cloth nappies, and to use expressed breast-milk rather than formula feed, and to cope with baby-led weaning chaos. He dismissed it as being more like baby-farming than the first choice, because it’s larger and thus has more babies there, and he just preferred the feeling of the first choice. But we’re getting a bit short on options; I have to find something and get it all sorted out before I can finalise details re my job, and my senior manager is off on leave for a month in February, which would leave things hanging. And no-one likes things hanging. (Except unless things = plants, or Gardens of Babylon, in which case fine – hang away.) I’ve also found another couple which look worth a go; one I have yet to get hold of, but it has at least an outstanding OFSTED report whatsit, and the other is another branch of our first choice (small set-up, but several branches nonetheless).

I admit to having cried when the nursery manager told me about this problem. She apologised profusely, and said the staff will get a bollocking; she was lovely about it, in fact. None of which makes the slightest bit of difference. And of course it reminds me all the more that I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS, ANY OF IT. I just want to stay at home and look after my daughter myself. Because yes, I do believe that I’m the best person to do it, and that she needs me, and I hate the idea of leaving her with anyone. Anyone. I’d psyched myself up to be practical about all this, and to ask the right questions, and to think about the fact that the witchling is a sociable baby, it seems, who enjoys people and places and Things of all sorts. And then this just sort of took the wind out of my sails.

I am off to eat mincemeat slices now, while feeling sorry for myself and slightly pissed that I interrupted the witchling’s deeply peaceful-looking snooze a good hour earlier than I would otherwise have done, for a car-journey which was utterly pointless.