Pumpkin's rant of the day: An obligation to say yes to agency work means abandoning my children

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It's still fairly early. Well, it's not that early, it's almost 10am but early for a rant of the day! I work for an agency. It's a recruitment agency for all kinds of work but I work for their childcare department. I'm on holiday at the moment because it's school holidays and I'm supposed to be term time only. I did, however, agree to a couple of days a week over the summer (I'd already booked my week away before I agreed to that). Well, I had a call yesterday asking me to work today. Obviously I couldn't because I'm not available so I just ignored the voicemail they left! I would probably have declined the hours anyway as it would have been almost 11 hours and would have meant having to ask someone else to have Mini overnight the night before as it was an early start and Midi (my eldest who usually looks after Mini if I work early) is away. I had a call again this morning about work next week. As I said, I'd agreed to up to 2 days a week over the holiday. I usually do anything from 2 to 5 days between two agencies during term time. It usually works out at 3 or 4 most weeks. Anyway, I'm sure they must be aware of people's availability but they wouldn't be the first agency to ask too much of people. So they called this morning and asked me to do a full week next week. I asked for the hours and it was mostly 8:30 - 2 with one day until 3:30, and another until 5 so I thought that wasn't too bad, it still means I can spend most afternoons with my boys. But they are the reason I limit the hours I do over school holidays. I don't like not being able to pick them up from school but I like it even less if I have to leave them all day when they're not at school. So I have agreed to the hours for next week but I am annoyed because I agreed with the agency that I would do 16 hours a week term time only, now I'm doing twice that many hours next week when I'm not supposed to be working at all. Sometimes I wish I had a job with set hours so I knew what I was doing all the time without having to wait for a call (which is often last minute) to tell me they've booked me in for work. I suppose agency work has the advantage that I am able to turn down work if I need to but the more I turn down, the less they will offer. Of course, the more I go out of my way for them, the more they will expect so I am trying to balance my time, letting them know that I will sometimes do more but also trying to remind them that there are reasons why I don't work full time. I don't like leaving my boys as it is but it's illogical to me that I'm having to abandon them while I look after other people's children. I also don't like other people's children. Well, that's the rant for today. I'm waiting, again, for the other half to wake up. He hasn't been too bad but he hasn't been getting up until around 11 so we're not starting out until 12 or later. I find that that makes for quite a short day, and feel like we've wasted half the day as we could have been doing more. Now, I'm going to put Mini in the shower, then have one myself, then I don't know what today's plan is. TTFN