Daycare Part V

Well, I toured two daycare facilities today. One I was not so impressed with, the other I was more impressed with, however still not completely sold on.

I am equating this to picking a college, or a grad school, although oddly I think more went into my selection of a college than of a grad school, but that's beside the point, and also my situation was much different when selecting a grad school and location played a big factor. But that's neither here nor there, I picked one, I got a stellar education and I have a sweet matted and framed Master's degree hanging in our living room to show for it - and a pretty sweet job to use those hard honed skills I learned in grad school.

Ramble much? Oops..back to the daycare.

Both facilities were what I call "institutional facilities", i.e. NOT a home daycare. We'd prefer a home daycare but are having trouble "unearthing" them as J says. We've checked the state's website as well as asked everyone we know and to no avail. So we're going with our list from the state (I may tap into some other resources that maybe the state may not cover for whatever reason)and nixing them off one by one. I'm working on our county, and J is going to work on overlaying zipcodes/counties that could also work for us.

So back to my visits.

The first one, the lady was nice, they had good policies and such, but the facility itself didn't really set me on fire - is that wrong? I didn't like the floors, I felt like the kids were bored, and really my first instinct was 'darn, if I was a kid and I had to be here all day, I'd totally be clock watching waiting for my Mom and Dad to pick me up." So...no dice there. Sorry.

The second one, while I had to kick my bad attitude to the curb, went a bit better. The lady was very nice, some may call her a chatty cathy, but it was great. The nursery was good (although I still kinda can't get over the standard cribs / with plexiglass separations breaks my heart to think of him being in one of those instead of his kick butt crib and bedding here at home although he'd only be in it to nap and maybe not even know the different, who knows) although each crib has the baby's name on it so nobody else sleeps there.

They had TONS of toys and a boppy pillow and such, and the babies "play" with one another as much as you can at X months old. And they hold them when feeding and talk to them and nurture them and give positive reinforcement and have re-direction if they get into something they shouldn't (but there's nothing in the room that isn't proofed / that they should get into to begin with. I guess all daycares are like that in that way. Nobody is going to tell you "oh, we let him cry for 15 minutes while we finished feeding the other baby the bottle". At least I hope not!

I have my fears that he will be left crying or not changed fast enough (they do diaper checks every 2 hours and/or change as needed as well so that should calm that fear...I guess). And they respond to the cries fast and they even know what the cries mean (I'll get to that point as well I imagine).

So basically, my socks weren't rocked off, but I don't know that they ever will be, but maybe they will, maybe it'll be like when I stepped foot on my college campus and KNEW (we visited 2 or 3 times, I applied and got in early decision) that I wanted to go there.

Just haven't found it yet.

Back to the drawing board, but all is not lost.

And apparently I ask good questions - the one lady said that my questions were similar to those they get asked when they went for accreditation (and got it) - yeah I knew I was in the right field, again, the Master's degree paying off :)