Saturday, October 5, 2013

Making Good on a Saga - Part 1

Ok so I'm gonna try and make good a few blog-promises I've made.  That means I need to stop watching Jimmy Fallon youtube clips.  Or the sacrifice of over sharing my life with complete strangers. 

So the daycare saga......

When The Boy first started going to a daycare it was an in-home daycare with Schmacey's sister in law.  It was somewhat on the way to the office (back when I worked in Hell).  There were also a bunch of ancillary friend's kids there too so it was a great little community.  I loved having that for him, but as he got older we wanted more for him even though we were reluctant to change his world.  Well then there was the job changes and the new job (my current employer) who happened to be about 45 minutes away from our house and the daycare which had moved multiple times over the two years was not 20 minutes in the opposite direction making my morning commute....  Difficult. And making me.... Difficult.  So when we factored in how much we were spending on gas we figured we could search for a new place.  When we started looking around us we realized that we didn't want to just drop him off at just anyone's house and we wanted standards and accountability for the place that would be basically co-parenting The Boy.  Mind you he was smack dab in the middle of being two years old, be made the change anyways in October (a hey a year ago!). 

After some research we went with a facility that was closer to our house.  They were welcoming and offered structure and education and even though the grandma that ran the place has a mustache we felt she was warm and loving. The transition was hard.  He was sick so often which we just chalked up to new daycare, lots of germs to get immune to and then the holidays and then a relapse, maybe.  Then his sleep pattern was all sorts of jacked up.  He turned three.  Juanito was traveling a lot around that time.  We had a hundred and one different reasons for why our sweet little boy was slowly morphing into a demon child.  He finally got pee potty-trained (thank heaven for Ms. Miriam) and then moved into the Three Year Old class room.  He still had poo accidents on a daily basis.  I call him poo-potty reluctant. But in that change things just got progressively worse.  We kept saying its because he is three.   Everyone says that terrible threes are way worse than terrible twos, right? 

By early spring Juanito and I  were always trying to figure which teacher he had that day.  Who did I drop off to? Who did he pick up from?  Who was with The Boy all day long.  It was never consistent.  It was never the same room.  It was never the same.  Period.  We were getting frustrated and started talking about moving but again didn't want to change his world.  Especially when he was so difficult already, what would happen with yet another change?  We both dreaded the what-ifs.  Then we started asking The Boy if he liked his school.
No
Do you like your teachers?
No
Do you like your friends?
No.
Huh....

So how much weight do you put into what a three year old says?  A three year old who confuses hot and cold and is convinced that Cassidy is a boy.  So we started looking putting feelers out.  No commitment just window shopping. 

Then when we found out about Tiny I started looking at this facility through the eyes of dropping off my newborn.  The teachers were often outside smoking or were walking around in a smoke-cloud that never really registered until you start thinking, I'm gonna drop off my infant with this ladies?  During RSV and flu season?  Um... 

So we started looking more aggressively.  I researched the Internet and then sent Juanito out on reconnaissance.  I made up a spreadsheet (I know shocking right?).  It became a daily conversation.  DAYCARE.  We came to the conclusion that we blindly jumped the first time and now we know more and asked better questions, but we were still bound by finances that didn't allow us to pay a mortgage payment in daycare.  So we finally narrowed it down.  I sent Juanito with a list of questions.  We took The Boy to visit to get an idea of the teachers and if he liked the place. We gave notice to the old place and I go to drop off the registration for the new place.  This is when it falls apart and I cried.  The owner (a wide-eyed-no blinking-passive-aggressive-rude-bitch) informs me in the poorest manner that until The Boy is out of pull-ups completely he can't be in the Three Year class room at her facility and must be in the Twos.  Which there was a wait list for.  I was shocked that after all the visiting and conversations and questions and dialogue that this NEVER came up.  She said, "well you never asked."  I was shocked and she treated me like a hostile parent when I was really a parent out of options.  This was the place that we had carefully selected and thought was the best choice for our boys.  This was going to be the last change until The Boy started school.  THIS WAS THE ONE!

I left the facility before there was more scene then there was.  I called Juanito driving home and by the time I made it home I was a bawling mess.  What the fuck were we going to do?  Luckily it was a day I was home early from work and The Boy was still at daycare.  Juanito and I got in the car and started driving to all of the places we could think of.  We got recommendations from places and went to more places.  We OD'd on daycare interviews and show and tells.  We then had to go to a doctor's appointment where we confused asking about discipline policy and cord blood banking. 

While on our way to pick up The Boy I talked to another friend to get recommendations on one of the places we looked at and liked where her son goes to.  That's when she mentioned another place.  So while Juanito went in to get The Boy she gave me the run down on what she knew about this other place.  When they got back to the car I said hey feel like checking out one more? 

And I'm glad we were all up for it.  The daycare is also a preschool connected to a charter school that is connected to a church.  And since it was the Friday before school started when we got there they were painting and cleaning carpets, getting ready for the next school year.  When we walked in the door I was immediately hit with a smell of old building and reminded of my old church in Nebraska.  It wasn't a fake smell or an overwhelming chemical smells to make it seem clean.  It smelled like a part of my childhood.  Would it be a part of my boys too?  We spoke with the director who was in shorts and a tee shirt from cleaning all day. She was really nice and walked us around to the different classrooms.  We talked about the Three Year Old class and the Four Year Old class and the infant room (that only allows three babies at a time and luckily there is an opening coming up).  It was really good, but was it the place?

We went home and I started plugging in all of the places we looked at into my lovely spreadsheet.  That narrowed it down to the great factor which is cost.  We made the decision to start at the new daycare the following week after getting all of our registration information to the school - without incident.  How do you think it went?

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

I swear....

OK, yes it has been established over the course of this summer that I suck at juggling all the balls of employee, wife, mother, friend and blogger.  Let's move past that.  I'm working on some stuff.  I swear.

I have officially five weeks left of this pregnancy and I aim to bring you all up to date before Tiny makes his grand enterance.