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?

Big Dilemma!

I need some help.  Major help.  If you are an interior designer, or a magician, then I will beg on my knees for you if you will help me!  Here's the story:

We are living in a 3 bedroom townhouse, with the 3 bedrooms and full bath upstairs, the living area and half bath on the main floor. and an unfinished basement.  Currently we have the master bedroom set up as the main day home play room, the other 2 bedrooms are set up for my daughter's bedroom and the nap time room, with the adult bedroom in the basement.  After a while of having the set up like this, I have realized that hauling kids up and down the stairs 5-6 times every day for meals and outside time is completely impractical, not to mention unsafe when I have 2 under 2 who don't know how to do stairs on their own.  So I decided that I would set up our kids picnic table upstairs, and make sure to do lots of slow cooker meals, and casseroles that I would be able to grab from the kitchen and bring upstairs to the kids to eat.  Well, in comes my home visitor from the agency and she tells me that is a big fat no-no to leave the kids alone even for 2 minutes to grab a meal and bring upstairs.  My husband and I sat down to brainstorm again, and came up with the idea to get a loft bed, or a futon for our 6 year old to sleep on, and convert her room into a kitchen for the day home.  As I thought about that idea I thought of how awesome it would be to have the day home area completely separate from the rest of the family home.  It would feel great to go upstairs to work, and come back downstairs to my home, so I got excited thinking about getting a mini fridge, and putting a toaster oven and slow cooker on nice shelves upstairs, until I realized that my daughter is starting school in one week. 

Now I'm not sure what to do.  As you may remember from some of my earlier posts I am open late hours, and will most likely have children here until past 9 pm.  With my daughter needing to be up at 7:30 am, she is going to need to be asleep by 8:30 at the latest in order to continue getting the sleep that she needs, that means getting her into bed by 8:00.  If any if you are parents then I'm sure you know that getting a kid to sleep with other children awake somewhere else in the house is no easy task, and getting a kid to sleep when there are other children just across the hall is damn near impossible.  So I am lost and do not know what to do.  I've come up with some ideas, but all of them have some pretty big negatives to them, so I'm enlisting your help in coming up with a solution that will work. 

Here are the options I have thought of so far, and a few of the negative points associated with them:

• Option 1: Day home stays completely upstairs, my 6 year old stays sleeping upstairs, she may or may not get enough sleep at night, making her grouchy, irritable, and miserable, consequently making the entire family grouchy, irritable and miserable.
• Option 2: Move the day home space to the main floor, and convert the master bedroom into a living room.  The two big cons of this are that we would need to get new furniture as our current couches would not fit upstairs, and we would have to watch TV at very low levels so as not to wake up the kids sleeping beside us.
• Option 3: Move the living room into the basement, day home goes on the main floor, all family bedrooms go upstairs.  The big cons of this scenario are again, needing to get new furniture as our current couches would not fit through the doorway to the basement, and of course having the main living room in a dark unfinished basement is not very appealing.

As stated earlier, if you are a magician that can magically solve this problem I would love you forever and literally do anything for you, because I'm not seeing a way out of this bind without causing a lot of trouble for everyone in our house.

Things are looking up!

Lots of good things are happening with my dayhome and I am excited!  My case worker from the agency stopped by today for her final visit, so I am certified under the agency, which means more money for me, and more potential clients headed my way.  I also have a very nice lady with 2 children who is now ready to start, bringing my total count up to 3, which means I only need to find one more space and I am full.  The 2 families I have on board now are both needing afternoon/evening care, which fits perfectly into the schedule that I wanted.  The one little guy who is here right now is only part time because dad cannot afford full time fees, but when I mentioned that I would be accepting subsidy he was excited because he does qualify, which means he will be paying less money and I will be getting more money, so we both win! 

It seems like it's been a long time coming, but it looks like everything is finally falling nicely into place, so can you see why I'm excited here?  We've been struggling a bit financially these past few months, but it looks like I'll be getting a nice paycheck by the end of month, not to mention getting to spend some time with some wonderful new kids!

Why I love having a dayhome

My first child has started, a wonderful little boy that started off very shy, but after only a couple of days is really letting down his guard and getting along splendidly with my daughter's.  Yesterday I was watching them play together and it made me think about why I love having the dayhome so much, compared to working in a daycare.  Essentially, they are they time thing: taking care of children, but there are plenty of differences.

1.  I don't have to leave the house.  This means no commute, no fighting with rush hour traffic, no bundling up the kids in -40 weather to get to work, no running to catch the bus.  If I don't want to leave the house all day, I don't have to.

2.  I can let kids be kids.  In a daycare setting when you have anywhere from 12-20 kids in the same space together, things can get out of hand very quickly.  Kids are always being reminded to be quiet, and don't rough house, there is quite a long list of "no's" that you have to tell the children.  With a dayhome, there are only 6 children at the most, and 2 of those are babies, so with 4 kids running around, it's relatively easy to keep the under control, without having to say "no" very often.

3. My kids can sleep in.  Is there anything worse than having to wake up a child in the morning before they're ready to wake up?  I think not.

4. It forces me to keep a clean house.  After all, I can't expect parent's to want their children to be playing on a dirty floor, or eating off a table that hasn't been wiped in days.

5.  It makes me keep a routine.  I know that having a daily routine is practically an essential for any kids well-being.  When kids know what to expect during the day there are less tantrums, less fights, and they are happier children when they can learn what to predict throughout the day.  I know all this, yet when it is just my own kids I slack off, having other children to take care of means I need to keep a predictable schedule so everyone stays happy.

6. I don't have to pay someone else to take care of my children, while I take care of someone else's children.

7. I set my own schedule.  If I don't want to work a certain day, I just let my parents know I'm not available that day.  Likewise with holidays.

8. My monthly income is not finite.  In a daycare my income is limited to how much the owner is willing to pay me, which usually isn't much, and is always the same whether I am watching 4 kids or 8 kids.  In my own dayhome I can choose my income.  If I only need a little bit of extra money, I only need to watch one or two kids, if I want to make lots of money, I can take the maximum of 6 children, plus some part time or drop in kids, and keep my dayhome open extended hours.  It is up to me, and I love that.

9. I don't have to sell my self short.  Working in daycares I found my boss never appreciated me, always putting the needs of parents above the needs of the staff, and sometimes even putting her needs above both of those.  Some parents didn't appreciate what I did, and only viewed me as nothing more than a teenage babysitter.  When it's my business, it's my rules.  If I feel that a parent is not respecting me, I can tell them to take their kid somewhere else.

10.  I get to be my own boss!  Need I say more?

Still Procrastinating

First off, let me start by saying I know that once my dayhome is officially started I will be the most awesome worker, my house will be clean, the kids will have fun, and everything will be great, but in the meantime, I really need someone to give me a good kick in the butt.

I know I need to get started, we need the money, we made the move specifically so I could finally start my day home, I have been dreaming of having a day home for years, so why is this so hard to get started?  Maybe it stems from my childhood shyness.  Maybe I don't want to give up all the free time I have every day.

I think I'm scared.

I'm scared of starting this thing that has been a dream of mine for so long, only to find out I may not like it.  What if I HATE being at home all day with 4 extra kids in tow?  What if I find myself losing patience, what if I let my husband down?  What if I let my children down?  What if I let myself down?  "Gulp."  I  don't think I can handle that.  So I find it easier to procrastinate, instead of actually moving on with my life. 

But why?  I know I love children.  I know I love being around kids.  The only thing that drove my crazy at my most recent daycare job was the boss, so why would I not enjoy running my own day home where I am the boss?  I'm sure I will, but there's that tiny voice inside my head that keeps saying "what if?"  and it scares me.

So this is me saying I am not going to be scared anymore.  I know this is what I want to do, I would not have turned my life upside if it weren't.  So I am going to start this, and I know I am going to enjoy it, because this is my passion.  I am going to stop letting my fears get in the way of what I truly want to do.