Daycare! We has it.

It’s been about 45 days since ITMama’s contract was not renewed, and when that happened we lost daycare that was associated with her workplace. Since then she’s been at home with the babe while job hunting and babysitting simultaneously.

I guess she started looking for daycare the day after, and since that time we’ve toured several places in Nashville. There are, in most of them, many many month-long waitlists and getting in takes time.

One daycare we found had an immediate opening, I took off work and we flew to tour it. They forgot to mention that to be in that class the baby had to walk on their own, which Maggie refuses to do without a hand to hold on to, but she could if she felt like it. That was a disqualifier.

I talked to a friend of mine yesterday and told him the news that we had found a place and he asked why, considering ITMama had not managed to procure employment at that point. I had to tell him that unless you have daycare in place in Nashville, you can’t get a job. You won’t find anything in a week, two weeks, or even a month.

That’s dangerous… get a job, find out there’s no way you can get daycare in time, lose job, finally get daycare and have a $600+ a month contracted bill for daycare you no longer need or can afford.

There needs to be something like COBRA for daycare. You lose it for some reason, you have a slightly higher cost daycare that you can park your precious in until you can locate reasonable decent daycare. Maybe do it something like a halfway house in which you pay them a higher rate than normal but once you get a good daycare you get some of that back in the form of either a voucher or major tax credit.

Dunno. In a town that’s booming as much as Nashville is it seems daycare can write their own ticket and get away with it, and that’s not a good thing as when there’s a bad daycare parents cannot get out of it in a reasonable amount of time.

That’s not good for anyone, except for the bad daycares.

T-44 days to daycare.