Parenting pro tip: choosing a daycare (supplemental advice)

This is not a comprehensive guide to choosing a daycare, you can find those elsewhere. This is a supplemental set of things to consider when getting daycare that we’ve run into.

Choose a daycare not associated with employment

Employers can change suddenly and unexpectedly as we learned a couple of weeks ago. In our case it left a 20something mile drive to a daycare that no longer had employee discounted rates and was in the ass-opposite direction of where I needed to be daily.

It also lead to a sudden and unexpected cancellation of our daycare contract leaving a sick job hunting parent looking, and a sick baby stuck together.

Think close to home when choosing a daycare, not close to work

weather

Daycares tent to close when it rains sideways or the city or state is freaking out about something that will never hit your area. Since baby came, I’ve watched as time and again predictions of storms that never came shut down schools and daycares in areas that missed the storm by 80 miles.

They consider it better safe than sorry to shut down, it is, but when you show up and they’re closed your next stop is home.

illness (baby)

I’ve had my baby turned away after a 20 mile ride many times for the daycare claiming she was sick or too sick to be there. Since there’s no other solution for most than to turn around and go home, the close you are to home the better.

illness (parent)

If you’re sick the last thing you feel like doing is being around baby. While I was sick for nearly six weeks and at home with Maggie I laid on the couch coughing (oddly I’m getting a suggestion to change coughing to crying,) and miserable while my bright eyed baby wanted attention that I could not give.

I’d really rather have driven her a couple of miles, dropped her off in daycare, and then proceeded to crash and sleep away the sick.

Have an idea of a backup daycare

Something you need to consider is that you might have to fire these people. Friends of ours had a care worker who was sleeping on the job, letting the kids hit each other and steal things, and generally just not doing the job.

While you may love the place and love the kids, you may also have to fire them for incompetence and the waiting time for daycares can be up to a year out. This is great for daycares as they know they can underperform and you’re stuck with them for a long time.

In our case, you might just find your daycare suddenly and unexpectedly gone as part of your department no longer existing.

wrap up

That’s about it, we’ve been without daycare for a couple of weeks now, so this is by no means a final piece. These were just some things I had running through my head today as I went and surveyed the childcare bunker that’s being constructed outside my work.