Daycare Recap

Well, we were supposed to meet with the day care on Thursday and I got a phone call from the lady who was in charge of tours and she said that she had a family emergency and wanted to know if we could reschedule. I was fine with that since we have time before the baby comes. We rescheduled for Friday so right after work I swung by to pick up Ryan and we were on our way.

I haven't been in a day care since... I was very young and my mom tried the day care thing with us for a few weeks before deciding it wasn't her cup of tea. She had always been a stay at home mom and being that we were slightly older it was an awkward adjustment since we were not familiar with the situation. So, being that it had been so long I didn't really know what to expect exactly.

We walk into a very nice lobby with a reception area and a computer hooked up to the door that went into the day care area. Around the rest of the room were a handful of other doors leading to small offices. Jennifer (the lady I was supposed to meet/the owner/the person I had spoken to on the phone) greeted us and got the tour started.

She first breifed us on a little history about the center. They have a handful of other locations through out Delaware that are well established and this particular branch just recently opened up in Newark taking the place of another daycare center that apparently had a poor reputation.

Next we started the tour. The computer in the lobby was hooked up to the door leading to the daycare center and in order to enter the building you needed to enter your individual passcode and the door would be unlocked. In addition to unlocking the door, entering your passcode allowed you to access your account, any parent communication and much more. I was impressed (even though I'm assuming other places we will look at will have similar systems in place?) ! Also, every individual we sign up as official pick-up people will have their own code.

We got to glimpse the different rooms. They were all broken up by age (each with their own brightly colored door). We looked at the older rooms first and saw the kids playing and doing their own thing (all surprisingly well behaved!) - all the little cubbies, the outside play ground and much more.

Next we got to the toddler room which had about 3-4 kids and 1 teacher all sitting on the floor reading a book together (a good sign in my opinion!). What was particularly adorable is that this room was located right near the main entrance/exit for the school and they had to keep the room door closed because there was one little boy who hated when people would leave and would cry so around pick up time they would keep the door closed so that he didn't see everyone leaving him.

The last of the age rooms we stopped at was the infant room where they had a series of cribs, high chairs and toys all around the room. There didn't seem to be any new borns while we were there (cribs and high chairs were empty) but there were little guys and girls wandering around the room on hands and knees and some stumbling from toy to toy on their wobbly little legs. What was particularly nice about this room was that there was a "no shoes" policy so that the kids could crawl around with out the added germs that people carry in on their feet.

Other good features:

1. They have a cafeteria for lunch and snack times so the kids get a new surrounding and also they don't eat in the germy classrooms.
2. Formula and lunches are provided for the kids.
3. Teachers are all OVER certified according to state standards - with degrees in child care, not just the certificates required.
4. They are trained in medicine administration.
5. Each room has a board with each childs daily schedule, quirks, etc. in case there are new teachers who don't know the children very well.
6. The teachers are on 10 hour schedules so the person who we drop the baby off to will be the same person who is there when we pick him/her up so they'll know how he/she was through the whole day (not just for the hours they were there).
7. They operate with minimal time-out and instead work more on cause and effect type discipline coahing the kids about right any wrong which is something I support.
8. They operate on an open door policy which basically means we are encouraged to spend time with our child while he/she is there. When working our child into daycare we can come in for a day and spend time there with him/her before they are left there alone for a full day.
9. They have minimal holiday time off which means their schedule will not interfere with our work schedule too much.

So, in conclusion there seemed to be a lot of pluses about this particular daycare center. Being that it was the first place we stopped at we don't have anything to compare it to. I'm assuming as we see more places we'll be able to say that we like "this" about one place and dislike "this" about another. But for now, it seemed like an all around decent center and the people seemed extremely friendly. As it is right now I would have no problem leaving our child there after I return to work but would first like to explore more.