Daycare has left me with an hour a day toddler
The scenario goes as such – I wake up at 6am and kill the alarm, there’re two alarms set one for six and one for seven. Seven’s the magic point where you just have enough time to do everything, get showered, brushed, drop baby at daycare and get to work on time.
I’m up sometime around 6:30-6:50 most days, that six AM alarm is just wishful thinking. Most days I’ve looked up to a monitor showing a sleeping baby and let her lie for a little longer, today she was up and ready to move.
Go down, get baby’s diaper changed and get her dressed, grab a bottle of milk, come upstairs and throw on some show for about 10-15 minutes as we bustle to get ready and Maggie downs her milk. Ten or so minutes of playing with Maggie – you don’t play with her till after her milk, she’s not cotton to that, and then it’s time to ship her off to daycare at about 7:40.
What we get back every day at ~5:30 is an exhausted baby who has been going all day and just wants to hold you for a couple of minutes and then eat everything in site. She’s eating at daycare according to reports and her getting heavier every day, she’s just burning a lot of energy.
She’ll down a bottle of juice, a sandwich, and a collection of food that looks like it might be a meal for a normal sized human. There’s some interaction when she’s eating, but most of it is “you there parent, give me some of that food over there.”
Next nearly daily is the washing off of the weird prison-soap smell of the daycare. We don’t know where it’s coming from, the daycare doesn’t smell like it, the babies don’t smell like it when dropped off, and the place doesn’t really have a hint of it, so where it comes from who knows.
After bath, it’s put her in jammies, grab a bottle of milk, she grabs a breastfeeding pillow we have and uses it in an unintended manner as a lounge chair, chugs the milk all the time giving the “I’m about ready to play with you” eyes.
There are usually 10 more minutes of play before the eye rubbing or standing on the head commence. If you put her down now she’ll request to be placed in the bed so she can go to sleep. If you keep her up there’s some sort of tipping point at which the baby goes insane and then she’ll wake up every two hours. It’s in everyone’s best interests to let the baby sleep.
And from 7-11 most days we exist with a sleeping baby in the other room kind of secretly hoping she gets a second wind and will get up and play. That or take a much longer nap at daycare so she can stay awake until at least 7:40 or so.
Right now we’ve got the ability two days a week to spring her earlier, but with getting her adjusted to a schedule I don’t want to introduce more chaos than is needed until she’s a happy baby.
Waiting for the weekend for a day of hauling my rugrat around. Think I’m supposed to man up and be happy for this, but eh… waiting for her to get acclimated so I can do some half daycare with her.
