In most families in Finland both parents work. They can do this because there is a well-established system of day-care centres at reasonable prices.

These reasonable prices come about because the people working in the day-care centres are, by all accounts, despite (as is typical for Finland) being well trained for the job, badly paid.

If all the places in the official day-care centres are taken then there's a second-level option which is private day care. This is something that seems (from my local experience where we've had two such cases) to be done as a side-earner by fairly new mothers on maternity leave with their own newish children.

But back to the local authority day-care centres. They have fairly restrictive rules for dropping off and picking up times which often leads to one parent dropping off a child on the way to work and the other parent picking them up on their way home. It's always amusing when at a seminar with guest speakers from abroad there are suddenly quite a few people (usually men) leaving mid-way through because it's time to pick up the kids. (It's quite handy actually as cover for when the speaker is driving you mad with his German accent or boring speaking style - but don't tell anyone I told you that).

Most day-care centres are shut throughout the entire month of July when the whole country takes holiday from work even if (as in my case) they'd prefer not to. (In my case the company's customers are all off on holiday so there's not much paid work to do for them and thus we are "encouraged" to have summer holidays then too).

However this week is the beginning of August on Wednesday so (by some very peculiar rule thought up by a Mon-Fri fetishist) the day care centres are open on Monday and Tuesday as well despite those days being in July.

(Don't worry, I'm getting to the mad charges)

So my friend's wife, keen to have the final week of her holiday in peace said she'd take their 2 year-old in on Monday. Luckily my friend had his wits about him and she will in fact now take the 2-year-old in first on Wednesday (1st of August).

Why? Because the payment rules for these day-care centres are that even if the child is only there for ONE day in a calendar month, a full monthly charge (ca 200 Euros or 270 US dollars) is made.

This sort of madness is in fact very familiar to me because in Sweden my son was also in day care but his day-care place was only a half-day place (almost everyone else had full day places but for reasons I won't go into here the half-day place was all the local authority would grant in my case). I had to pay as much for a half-day place as I would have paid for a full-day place!