Daycare Hunting

The hunt for the perfect daycare continues. We’ve visited seven centers, all within just a few miles of our house and work. We’ve narrowed it down to our top two choices and plan to get on their waiting lists soon. Our top choice is a place called Enchanted Care in Dublin. We liked this center the best for a few reasons:

• It seemed to have a really good balance between nurturing/play time and academics. Other places that we visited were either very academically oriented or very lax and didn’t really have much of a curriculum at all.
• One of the goals of the center is “transition.” In other words, not having the children cooped up in the same classroom 9 hours a day. The classrooms are designed with two adjoining halves (the rooms are quite large). Half of the day is spent on one half doing certain activities and the other half of the day is spent on the other half, focusing on different types of activities. In addition, there is a huge “muscle room” in the center of the daycare with a spongy floor, playground equipment, games, etc. Let’s face it, in Ohio it isn’t going to be nice enough to go outside and play several months out of the year. Children don’t eat in their classrooms (like in many of the facilities); there is a dedicated cafeteria with staff to prepare the meals and clean up (the teachers don’t have to be distracted from the children to do these tasks). The center also has a library with computers that each class goes to once a week. They offer classes for an extra fee like tumbling, tap, Gymboree, and computers. There are also playgrounds outside for when the weather is nice but every center that we saw had that feature.
• Each classroom has a pet like a guinea pig, a rabbit, a frog, etc.
• The classrooms were warm and inviting. In fact the whole place was decorated nicely and just gave off a good vibe.
• Two of my coworkers/friends take their children there and gave us very good recommendations. This is huge of course!
  

We are meeting with my sister’s babysitter on Sunday. She has been in the in-home care business for about 20 years and comes very highly recommended. The downside with her is that she lives about 15 minutes away from us and so we would have about a 30-35 minute commute each way when we currently have about a 10 minute commute. We are considering taking Baby O to her while she is still just an infant (maybe for her first year to 18 months) and transferring her to a center (close by) when she gets a little older.