An Open Letter to the Women Offering Super Cheap Childcare.

To my fellow Day Home Owners:

We all enjoy taking care of children, otherwise we wouldn't be doing what we are.  Yet unlike you, I am doing this because my family needs me to make money to survive.  Maybe your husband makes enough money to support your entire family on his income, so you figured you'd take in one or two children into your home and offer them very cheap rates because you just want your little one to have a playmate, or just make a little bit of extra spending money.  But we can't all afford to do that.  My husband's salary, while decent, is not enough to support the living costs of a family of 4, so I need to make money at this business, otherwise we are hooped.  Now every family thinks that the dirt cheap rates you are offering should be the norm, and they think that they should be entitled to having their children be in a very small group.  Well I would love it if I could afford to only take in one or two kids and make a few hundred bucks, but I can't, and because you have set the bar so low, I can't even get enough people interested in my day home.  They either think I am charging way too much (which I'm not) or have way too many kids (which I don't).   So I am begging all of you, please reconsider your position on this, and please think of the other women in the business.  We are families sometimes struggling to make ends meet, and because we are offering a quality service and asking to be paid what we deserve, we are getting stomped on because there's always someone cheaper out there.

Sincerely

  A fellow Day Home Owner who is currently struggling

My child....My choice

I saw this today and was completely blown away, so I knew I had to write about my feelings on this. 

*disclaimer:  this could get ugly, please do not continue if you are easily offended.

There are a few phrases that I've seen floating around the internet lately when I've been reading my mommy blogs and browsing facebook pages over parenting debates, the two that have stuck out the most to me are these:  "Why do you care what I do to my child?"  and "My child  my choice."  I don't know about you, but these two phrases rub me the wrong way.  By this logic I should not be concerned if I see someone physically or emotionally abusing their child, after all it's their child, so it's none of my business, right? 

There are several issues about parenting that I feel very strongly about, and please know that my goal of talking about these issues is to never offend anyone, only to educate and share my personal experience about them.

Most of my friends know that my youngest daughter is completely unvaxxed, and my older hasn't received any vaccinations since she was 2, so I suppose now is as a good a time as any to explain this a bit to people who don't understand.

I've done plenty of research on the subject, in fact when I was first told about the possibility that vaccines could be harmful I poo-pooed the idea as stupid.  After all, my doctor told me that vaccines were best for my baby, why would he lie to me?   But then something happened that unsettled me.  I was looking at my daughter's vaccine chart and noticed something called "Varicella"  I had never heard of that before, so I thought I'd do some research to find out what it meant.   I was quite taken aback to learn that Varicella is just the scientific name for Chicken Pox.   Chicken Pox??  But everyone I know had chicken pox as a kid, why is that something that kids need to be vaccinated for?
  This lead me down the wonderful path to learning all about the vaccines, their ingredients, and side effects.  I can safely say I will never inject another vaccine into any of my children ever.  I won't bother to post any links, because the information is readily available for anyone who wants to find out, but I do encourage anyone reading this to first and foremost google "vaccine insert"  so you can find the official inserts from the vaccine manufacturer listing their ingredients and possible side-effects. 



Back to the top now.  Why do I care if it's not my children?  Why do I care if your children are vaccinated or not?  One simple reason.  Your children are my children's peers and our future generation.   I want to see our future generations thriving!  But I look at our children today and I see anything but.  Children today are riddled with asthma, allergies, chronic infections, autism, and so much more!  What are these children going to be like as adults?  How will our society function?  Those are things that worry me.  I am not saying vaccines are the only culprit here, but in a world where everyone is worried about eating tuna because there may be trace amounts of mercury in it, yet runs off to inject their children with mercury filled vaccines, something is wrong.   

What happens when I try to make crayons.

For a few weeks now (okay, maybe longer) I've been telling myself I'm going to make some new crayons with all the piles of broken crayon pieces I have laying all over my house.  The problem was I didn't have any thing to make them in, so I was stoked when I found some silicone mini muffin pans with a neat leaf design at goodwill for 99 cents for a 3 pack.  I brought them home and got to work right away (okay, okay, maybe not right away).  Yesterday I told the kids we were going to make some crayons, and they eagerly started ripping the paper off the crayons, but just as quickly got bored and went to play, leaving me tediously unwrapping what seemed like an endless pile of broken crayons. After what felt like hours the crayons were peeled, broken up, and arranged carefully in the baking dishes.  Now to melt them.

I turned the oven on the lowest setting at 170 degrees, thinking, hey, they're crayons, it shouldn't take too much heat to melt them.  10 minutes later I take a peek and they're still rock solid, so I turn the heat up to 225, 10 minutes later they're looking a little soft, but not even close to melting, so a crank the oven to 300.  10 minutes later I take a peek.

Oh Shit

 You know those leaf shaped silicone mini muffins pans I was talking about...turns out they weren't for muffins.  Yep, that's right, they were starting to melt.  But the damn crayons were still not melting!

I quickly pulled them out of the oven (thanking my lucky stars I had though to put a solid metal baking tray underneath them at least) and looked at the half melted ice cube trays and the not quite half melted crayons wondering what the heck I should do.  I know, put them in a bowl so you can melt the crayons in the microwave, then pour them back into the trays to cool.  Genius.  After the transfer has been made, not quite completely succesfully, I look at the bowl I just put them in ready to pop it into the microwave.

Oh Shit

It's a metal bowl.  Damnit.  Scrape Scrape Scrape.  Yes, it's clean.  Ok, now the crayons are in a microwave safe bowl so I put them in the microwave, I figure a minute should be good to start.  30 seconds later.  Beep, Beep, Beep!

What the hell?

It's the smoke detector.  There was no smoke, but apparently my smoke detector doesn't think it's a good idea to melt crayons in a microwave.  Duly noted.  Well, the crayons are mostly melted, So I give them a quick stir and pour them into the shapes to cool.  By this point instead of having the fun, rainbow colored crayons I was envisioning, they are very disgusting brownish purple hue.

Those crayons are finally transferred into cookie cutters to cool (did I mention those leaf tray thingy's were metled beyond repair?)  But there's still some crayons left, so I figure I'll try again.  This time I use some metal cookie cutters.  I put them on a piece of parchment paper on a metal cookie tray and fill them up with crayons.  I check these after 10 minutes.

Oh shit.

Yes, they are melting, but it's melting underneath the cookie cutters and making one flat crayon.  I give up.  Oh, and you know that bowl I used to melt the crayons in.  This is what it looks like now.

The only question now is do I try to save it, or do I give it up to the craft gods as a sacrifice?