Well, never say never, but I’m pretty sure that Friday was Stella & Harvey’s final day at daycare!
About 6 months ago I wrote a bit about my frustrations with the way our licensed home daycare provider had drastically changed the environment in her home by deciding to home school her 8 and 11 year old boys without notifying the daycare parents in advance. My frustrations with her as a business owner and daycare provider went far beyond that particular example, but the bottom line was that I knew she loved my kids and I knew she had the best of intentions with them & her business in general, and since there were no other viable options in this tiny town, I tried to make my peace with my frustrations and be okay with things.
A picture of the kids with Miss Jen from last Friday – poor Stella woke up with a horribly swollen eye on Friday, we think from an allergic reaction to something.
The problem is that settling for the status quo is eventually not good enough for anyone. Jaime dying has sort of flung me into a carpe diem mentality, and our daycare situation was no exception. A couple of weeks ago a woman in town who used to run her own daycare talked to me about watching the kids in our house in more of a nanny situation. She is going to charge us the same rate we were paying for daycare, but I won’t have to have the kids up and washed and dressed and fed and out the door to daycare before I go to work in the morning. Also, it will be a 2-on-1 situation instead a 6 or 8-on-1. As great as that sounds, I was honestly hesitant about making the change because Stella totally loves her friends at daycare (as well as the provider), but the nanny situation would be SO much better for Harvey (IMO) and so much less stressful for me in the mornings that I finally pulled the trigger on making the change.
Once we decided to do this, the next big step was telling Miss Jen. I was honestly pretty terrified to tell her, both because I knew she’d miss having my kids (and the income that came with them) and because she tends to react pretty emotionally about things. Thankfully the conversation actually went really well, and when it was all said and done, she told me that me pulling the kids was actually going to push her to make a change she had been wanting to do for a long time but had been afraid to do. Long story short, she has been feeling burnt out, overwhelmed, and like she has been putting her own kids 2nd for a long time, so she gave all of the other daycare parents a 30 day notice, and on May 1st she is closing her daycare, moving to a town 30 minutes away, putting her kids into the Christian school there (instead of homeschooling), getting the surgery for her severe endo that she’s been putting off, and restarting life there with her husband and kids. PHEW. Big changes.
So ya, last Monday I told Miss Jen that it was the kids’ last week with her and this Monday I will have a Nanny in my house watching my kids. That sounds so sudden – and so fancy! Ha.
Now I’m just praying that this was the right move for us and that Miss Margie is in this for the long haul. Everyone I know who has used her RAVES about her — but she’s also known for changing her mind about wanting to do childcare every year or two, and we’d be S.O.L. if that happened (because there are no other options in this town of 1,000 people). So we shall see. For now this will hopefully be a great change for us and for our kids, and I am incredibly happy about that.