Day Care....dum da dum dum DUUUUUUM

Well, our children started “School” this week…it’s basically a fancy pants Day Care center and I feel like the worst mother in the WORLD. I’ve always vowed never to put my kids in Day Care, but here I am…faced with no other choice but to, and so here it goes. I’ll give you the Pros and Cons of Day Care, as I see them, and then I’ll tell you our experience thus far :

PROS :
1. Kids Learn
2. Kids socialize
3. Kids get structure
4. Kids taken care of during the week so we can use grandmas on the weekends for babysitters

CONS:
1. EXPENSIVE (even the crappy ones are expensive…and they’re in a GOOD one, so you can imagine…)
2. Risk of kiddos getting sick (face it people, when your kids are around a bunch of strangers whose parents need their jobs as badly as you need yours your kids are bound to be exposed to sick kids)…and after all, a good dose of Tylenol and Sudafed before you drop your kids off is enough to “fool” the Day Care worker that your child isn’t sick and you get a few hours to make a good showing for your boss until the Center calls asking you to pick up your child because they’re sick…in the meantime, they’ve infected everyone else around them so the cycle never ends.
3. The kids are needier and clingier at night…and NOT in a “good” way. Daniel throws a fit every night after school and he’s at times inconsolable. It makes me feel like crap.
4. The stigma of “Day Care” and all that entails.
5. No control over what they’re exposed to day-to-day, and no disciplinary control either…

So here you go : 3 days (M, T, W) this week while I’m working 12 hours, and while Michael’s gone almost as long…the kids have been attending a State Accredited “Educational” Child Care Center. It’s costly, and we’ve yet to determine if it’s “worth it” because Daniel has been so weird lately.

If you read my blog on a regular basis, which I really hope you do, then you’ll know that he’s a really good kid and he minds really well. He’s polite, always saying “please” and “thank you” and he’s really awesome about sharing. So that’s why these last few days have been so strange. He ALWAYS minds, and he’s super potty trained now, so for him to have an accident is really weird…but he had TWO on Wednesday! One at School and one here at home, though the one here was less of an accident and more of an “on purpose” for goodness only knows why.

He tells me he doesn’t WANT to go to school at that School, he wants to go to Daddy’s School (he visited the Early Childhood Center at Oakridge last week) and he told me Oakridge is a better school…and every morning he asks me if that’s the school he’s going to and he looks like I’ve crushed him when I tell him no. I don’t know WHAT’S going on there…

But Zoe?? She’s awesome…she’s apparently loving every minute she’s at school, she never cries, she shares, she says “please” and “thank you” and she naps. She’s like the dream child for these educators, and I’m so thankful for that. Don’t get me wrong, Daniel is all those things for his teachers too, I mean if the worst complaint about him is that he’s “too affectionate” is that really a huge problem? We just need to work on “No means No” with him a little more!

Everyone says give it a few weeks…but a few weeks is almost a thousand dollars! EEK! Maybe it’d be better to cut our losses now and keep Zoe there, take Daniel out until the Fall, and figure something else out for him? I just don’t know.
What I DO know is this : if you’re going to put your children in any sort of child care, do it SOONER rather than LATER when they’ve set their own little social skills already. Poor Daniel, he’s so confused…

And we’re working on some speech issues he has too, he has trouble with certain “cl-“ words like “clothes,” “close,” “clay,” and the like. He says “plothes” and “plose” and “play” instead. But we’re working on it…just teaching him to slow down when he talks. Poor Baby. I really feel for him because he’s so emotional {he IS his mother’s son, in that respect} and he’s so sensitive…

Stay tuned, for these ARE the Days of Our Lives…