No Village, Must Raise Kid
Dutch was home fulltime with me for the first two years of her life. We did yuppie stay-at-home-urban-mommy things. We went to the park. We did playdates. We went to the Mommy Group. We did errands. We had lots of wonderful times. We were frequently bored out of our skulls.
Now Dutch is in daycare 4 days a week, at a fairly big local daycare that has sliding-scale tuition. It's diverse (in Portland - no alias necessary, I decided - I'm not going to call it "New York"- "diverse" mostly means "not all white kids," but this daycare is actually mostly non-white kids) and reasonably clean and friendly. Dutch is stuck in with the little kids, due to their waitlist system. We got off the waitlist for the class she had outgrown in the time we'd been waiting, and they told us that our only chance of getting into the next one up was to take this opening and they would "promote" her internally. It's like working at a corporation, I guess. Actually, maybe a lot like working at a corporation, with lots of grabbing and jockeying for position . She's the biggest and oldest kid in the class, and one of the few who actually talk. She's developing a comical fear of smaller children, because the littler, nonverbal kids tend to just grab and push rather than discuss and negotiate. She talks a lot about how the "babies want to knock me down." When we open the door in the morning, she gets swarmed by the other kids - they grab and pet and hug her, and it seems to overwhelm her. Cook says when he dropped her off one morning last week he turned away to talk to a teacher for a few moments, and when he looked back over at her, several kids were stripping off her sweatshirt while she stood there looking bemused.
Anyway, she will hopefully be Promoted soon, and that will improve the situation, since she's definitely frustrated by the "babies". But it's turning out to be a decent enough place, as far as we can tell. She seems happy to go there in the morning, and she talks about it when she's at home. The teachers like her, since she's tractable. She gets to play outside a lot, and she actually takes a short nap (something she can't be bribed or forced or tricked into doing at home) every day. She's learning about getting along in the world of school - she's learning to stand in line and take turns and follow a routine and listen to teachers. At the moment, my biggest hangup about it is that they have a dreadful school-lunch-type menu, so she eats lots of white/yellow/beige/pink food. Macaroni and cheese, and tuna sandwiches, and applejuice. Lots of grease and refined flour and sugars and depressed/mercury-laden meat. She loves it - the teachers tell me enthusiastically how well she's eating, and I just smile and nod. Of COURSE she eats it!!!
Setting the food issue aside, I have no qualms about leaving her there. She's only there about 7 hours a day, and I think it's entirely positive so far. (Though she has had some sort of cold pretty much continuously since she started there. I'd never seen snot come out somebody's tear ducts before.) Daycare is controversial in the world of Privileged Mommies Who Have a Choice Whether Or Not To Work, but I am entirely pro at the moment.
Now Dutch is in daycare 4 days a week, at a fairly big local daycare that has sliding-scale tuition. It's diverse (in Portland - no alias necessary, I decided - I'm not going to call it "New York"- "diverse" mostly means "not all white kids," but this daycare is actually mostly non-white kids) and reasonably clean and friendly. Dutch is stuck in with the little kids, due to their waitlist system. We got off the waitlist for the class she had outgrown in the time we'd been waiting, and they told us that our only chance of getting into the next one up was to take this opening and they would "promote" her internally. It's like working at a corporation, I guess. Actually, maybe a lot like working at a corporation, with lots of grabbing and jockeying for position . She's the biggest and oldest kid in the class, and one of the few who actually talk. She's developing a comical fear of smaller children, because the littler, nonverbal kids tend to just grab and push rather than discuss and negotiate. She talks a lot about how the "babies want to knock me down." When we open the door in the morning, she gets swarmed by the other kids - they grab and pet and hug her, and it seems to overwhelm her. Cook says when he dropped her off one morning last week he turned away to talk to a teacher for a few moments, and when he looked back over at her, several kids were stripping off her sweatshirt while she stood there looking bemused.
Anyway, she will hopefully be Promoted soon, and that will improve the situation, since she's definitely frustrated by the "babies". But it's turning out to be a decent enough place, as far as we can tell. She seems happy to go there in the morning, and she talks about it when she's at home. The teachers like her, since she's tractable. She gets to play outside a lot, and she actually takes a short nap (something she can't be bribed or forced or tricked into doing at home) every day. She's learning about getting along in the world of school - she's learning to stand in line and take turns and follow a routine and listen to teachers. At the moment, my biggest hangup about it is that they have a dreadful school-lunch-type menu, so she eats lots of white/yellow/beige/pink food. Macaroni and cheese, and tuna sandwiches, and applejuice. Lots of grease and refined flour and sugars and depressed/mercury-laden meat. She loves it - the teachers tell me enthusiastically how well she's eating, and I just smile and nod. Of COURSE she eats it!!!
Setting the food issue aside, I have no qualms about leaving her there. She's only there about 7 hours a day, and I think it's entirely positive so far. (Though she has had some sort of cold pretty much continuously since she started there. I'd never seen snot come out somebody's tear ducts before.) Daycare is controversial in the world of Privileged Mommies Who Have a Choice Whether Or Not To Work, but I am entirely pro at the moment.
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