Color Me Chill

What happens when your life suddenly turns upside down? One minute you’re in a comfortable routine of dropping the kids off at daycare and heading to the office. Then suddenly, with no warning, your boss informs you that due to current economic conditions ... blah, blah, blah ... today’s your last day, please leave your laptop on your desk.

Boom. Just like that all the expenses you thought you could pay suddenly become exorbitant luxuries.

If you’re lucky enough to work in a field in which you can start freelancing, and you can pick up a few gigs here and there, you suddenly don’t mind not heading into the office so much. The problem is, when you first start out freelancing, chances are you’re not earning even half the paycheck that you used to earn, which makes it tough to break out the checkbook to pay rent and (if you have kids) daycare. You start to think, hmm, could I work from home and have the kids with me at the same time? HA! Yeah, right.

You quickly realize that you can’t afford full-time daycare while at the same time you can’t afford not to work. What’s a person to do? I recently posed this exact scenario to Felicity Chapman, founder of Cubes&Crayons, a company that's offering both office space and daycare accommodations to parents who need both.

For working parents, an ideal situation is to go somewhere, with the kids, where they can work in peace and quiet for a couple/few hours a day while the kids are supervised by a trained staff (and if any learning takes place all the better). When parents do find full-time work, they can get good daycare from Cubes&Crayons without any hassles.

"This is exactly the market we are trying to capture right now," Chapman said, "people not needing full-time childcare but not able to go to zero.”

Cubes&Crayons have definitely seen an uptick in membership since the economic downturn; both from people laid off and now working part-time and needing less childcare as well as from those who were not working and are now job hunting. The company is even hosting pink slip parties specifically for job seekers.

At both the Mountain View, Calif., and the San Francisco campuses you can definitely get work done. In San Francisco, parents work upstairs while the kids play downstairs. In Mountain View, the parents work effectively next door to their children and have the luxury to pop in any time to take a break and play with their kids.

The San Francisco location opens June 1 and already has a waiting list. Cubes&Crayons is also hoping to expand nationwide.