How long did you take off and how far in advance did you tell everyone?
My friends provider originally told her parents that she would only take off a week or so and then told them after she had the baby that she was taking 6 weeks. IMO that is a little rude and she should have expected to lose some of her parents.
I personally don't have a lot of substitute options (most of my family lives at least 30-45 minutes from us) so I would need a lot of notice to cover 6 weeks of daycare.
I told them in early April that I was taking off for 8 weeks starting the end of July (I guessed the date because I knew from the start it would be a c-section. I was off by a week). After my last c-section, (I've had 4 now) I was in bad pain for a full 7 weeks.
I had 3 families, one of them was on maternity leave themselves and decided not to go back to work at all. One was a close relative of the first family and decide to leave their child with the first family, since the first mom decide to stay home and the third family had a bad fight between mom and dad about whether to find temporary care and then come back to me or put the child in a large center. That family had several options, the provider I found to cover for me was not geographically convenient for them, but I found a second provider that was and was willing to take them on a temporary basis. They also had family that would take the child temporarily. They ended up putting the child in the center, but apparently the fight between mom and dad was bad.