Daycare details (sort of)

Heather at Unexplain This did a post to day about her daycare option/choice which inspired me to write about ours. I think I’ve mentioned it previously, in passing, but I’ll talk about it more depth today, especially after Heather made me think about details I’d never considered before.

My friend M has a home daycare. She has 2 adorable children (her oldest, a daughter was one of my flower girls at my wedding) ages 4 and 2 and she is due to have her 3rd child approximately 2 months before me. I’ve known M for eons, and her husband, A has been a good friend of mine for even longer (I sang at their wedding – A is like my big brother). I trust M completely, I know there is no risk of odd or strange people being invited over to her house (other than her friends, who since many of them are my friends too, I can say they’re “safely” weird). M raises her children very similarly to the way I plan to raise my child/children. And I’m thrilled at the opportunity to have her 3rd child and mine, who will be very close to the same age growing up together. M has a history being a professional nanny for two families in the area and has had a host of kids in her daycare in the last few years. (She gave up nannying when her son was born since bringing 2 children along to someone else’s house was much more difficult). I even remember shopping with her (at Christmas time, when she was 9 month pregnant and her daughter was about 18 months and needed to be distracted) to get the final supplies for setting up her daycare.

On the other hand, I’m a little jealous that Heather gets to take her child to a daycare center where they have such stringent guidelines regarding cleanliness, etc. M has 2 cats and a dog, and while they are very well-behaved and I never see evidence of their natural animal mess laying around, I pray that my baby doesn’t get her father’s cat hair allergies!

I’m also still actively seeking other options for the baby – like me working from home so I don’t have to deal with daycare at all. I have a feeling it’s a pipe dream, as my mom just gave me some info regarding the medical transcriptionist possibility that may have shot it out of the water. More research to be done, but I’m getting more and more discouraged.