:: demystifying daycare, a plea ::

i had some helpers with me this week since the babysitter was sick (only emily is pictured here, but evan helped too) and it made me remember that i have a question that i'd like to ask everyone. everyone anywhere. i would like about 1000 comments on this post because i'm interested in ALL of the options. 

in the box, out of the box, near the box. this is an invitation for brainstorming.

my kids are in an awesome in-home daycare. but for a list of reasons that is important but not really right for delving into here on the blog, things are going to have to change with the daycare situation and because this change will more or less coincide with evan heading off to kindergarten in the fall,  I NEED TO KNOW WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.

how do you make half-day kindergarten + a younger sibling not yet old enough for pre-school (emily misses the cut-off by days and won't be able to go to preschool until she's a teenager, or so it seems) + a growing self-owned business that requires regular if not 100% full-time daycare?

i mean, on the one hand a nanny seems like the way to go, so evan can come home after school and i can be at work and emily can be taken care of all the while.

but we've tried the nanny situation before and maybe it's just us or something but nannies get sick a lot and then i get mad because inevitably they get sick when brian has court or some such trivial thing and so i have to be the one to ditch work and figure out how to still get the stuff done and have fun with the kids and not resent anyone or anything.

plus i like the idea of them being around other kids because again, maybe it's just me but i find that running a business and being home part time with the kids is not the recipe for tons of playdates. i think we probably end up with like fifteen playdates a year.

but i'm not even sure i have a grasp on what our other options are. here's my list. please add to it in the comments and feel free to (please do!) share your thoughts on making it all work.

OPTIONS:

1. a school-like daycare where the kids are separated into classrooms by age or whatever. this would separate emily and evan.
2. another in-home daycare, but i think this would need to be near home because of the aforementioned kindergarten thing, right? in other words, it would be best located in our school district or else i'd be leaving work in the middle of the day to chauffeur evan, right?
3. a nanny.
4. a shared nanny, like shared with another family or something, so that there could be more kids hanging out and being friends? maybe this is something i invented in my own wishful head.
5. latchkey for evan and something separate for emily. to the very best of my recollection i literally did not know kids with two working parents as an elementary school child, and so to me latchkey was this foreign place in the gym and the cafeteria where the weird kids went (i'm just being honest about my 8 year old prejudices here, folks) and maybe there they did weird things or maybe weird things were done to them? but maybe it's different now? or maybe it was always different? discuss.
6. something different altogether?

daycare mystifies me, my friends. clearly i need your help.