We have a six month old. I work, my wife stays at home with her.
Due to some changes in circumstance we’re exploring our options for daycare. It’s been eye opening to say the least. One place won’t take her until she’s a year old and enrollment is in August which means the soonest they’d consider her is August of 2012 when she’s 1.75 years old.
One place has a waiting list for the group 0 to 22 months. The soonest we’d be able to get on is May of 2013. Two years. Go on. Do a little back of the back of the envelope calculations on that one I’ll wait.
You back? Then you must now realize that every single name on that list comes from a family who have not yet put sperm and egg together to even form a fetus. That’s how far in advance this place has booked up.
So what about you? What’s been your experiences with day care? Poll to come but discussions welcome.
WE got on the list at various places when my wife was 4 months pregnant. My son started when he was three months old. There aren’t that many good places who do infant care. My understanding is that it gets easier to find daycare when the kid already a toddler.
I think it has something to do with where you live, too. I’m in St. Louis and we only started talking to daycares when I was about 6-7 months pregnant. We were able to reserve a spot right then and there after the tour. It’s not that the daycare was bad - actually, it’s the best I’ve found in town, though their preschool could use some work - but it’s one of the most expensive, so it prices a lot of people out.
We’re not hoity-toity by any means, but my husband and I are willing to splurge on certain things that will make our lives easier. For most things, we’re total misers (for example, my daughter still wears my son’s clothes from when he was a baby, many of which were second- or third-hand by the time I got them), but we’ll open our wallets for education, childcare and quality furniture.
I guess it matters a lot how old the child is when you are looking for care. But I never had to get on any waiting list at all. When my oldest was around 1 he went into an in-home care situation (which was amazingly wonderful) and then later went to a pre-school.
I live in the DC area. When I was pregnant the first time around, I quickly learned that if you don’t work for the federal government, there’s pretty much no infant daycare in the city. If you do work for the feds, you go on a long waiting list. We signed up for a waiting list pretty far from home, but fairly close to work. I was probably four months pregnant when I got on the list. We got offered a spot when the kid was 5 months old, but by then I’d given up on the idea of going back to work. When we moved out of the city and I went back to grad school, I sent my kid to a neighborhood daycare with no waiting list.
Honestly, this is at least part of the reason why so many people have nannies until their kids are 2 or 3.
My wife was planning on going back to work when our daughter was about five months old, so we had a little time after her birth to get her in some place and didn’t have a problem. Well, except for one place that wouldn’t take our daughter for 4 days a week even if we paid for five because “it wouldn’t be fair to the moms that needed five day a week care”.
The first place didn’t work out like we hoped it would though and after a month we were looking for some place new. Fortunately our second choice place had a spot open in a “classroom” with a “teacher” that was awesome and we were able to get in two weeks later.
I am in Canada and my Mat. leave was one year. About two months before I started back to work I called around and found a dayhome for my daughter. Some of the places I called wouldn’t even book more than one month in advance, while others did have waiting lists. The only reason I called so early is that we were going on vacation for about a month and wouldn’t be returning in time to make arrangements then.
On the other hand I have a friend that wanted to start back at work when her child was about 9 months old and had a hard time finding care for a child under one year.
My daughter went into daycare (not a school) when she was 3 weeks old. We spoke with and visited the owner of the daycare after our daughter was born, and she checked to be sure it was legal to take a child before 6 weeks.
This was not a matter of choice for us - my husband was in school full time at the time and I had absolute minimal sick/vacation time available - as it was, I had to take a week without pay. I felt like the worst mother in the world, but the folks at the daycare were wonderful. I was so fortunate to have found them.
Well we live in Kansas City which is fairly populous but we didn’t think it would be this bad. We’d never even considered that the waiting lists would extend to literally before conception. Seriously, why would the school even bother booking that far in advance? And who the hell makes a call to place a not-even-clump-of-cells into a school? “Hello? We’d like to make a reservation for March. What? You’re full until April? Can’t an exception be made, we had our heart set on March and I’m doing my wife right now. Oh fine. OK, sorry honey, I’m going to have to pull out now.”
Before the economic downturn everything was booked up years in advance. Now everything has free spots except the 0-2 year grouping. (I think it’s much harder to start up a 0-2 year day care – there are more licensing requirements, more stringent ratio requirements, and so on… so there are a lot fewer day cares for that age grouping than for older – there are a ton of preschools around here that take kids age 2-5, and I know of three that take 0-2, all booked up.)
But yeah. We’re in a shared nanny situation right now with a friend of mine which is working out wonderfully… partially because daycare was such a hassle.
I put our daughter down on the council daycare list when I was 14 weeks pregnant. I was offered 1-2 days of daycare when she was 13 months old - 3 months after I had gone back to work. (Our council does a single intake a year, in January).
I had arranged a nanny in the meantime so now during the week she has a day each with a parent, 2 with the nanny and 1 in daycare. There was the option of private daycare centres, but I didn’t like any I went to and the council ones are much more highly regarded.
I’m 9 weeks preg with #2 and am kicking myself that I’ve not got it on the list so far, although I hear siblings are easier to place.
I live in Chicago. There are literally daycares and preschools every half mile near me. I don’t know that all of them take infants, but toddlers and preschoolers are not a problem.
When my son was 18 months, I got him into the daycare at the college I was attending. It was great - I’d go eat my lunch in the observation room and watch him! No waiting list. I registered him the same day I registered myself for classes.
My daughter wasn’t ready for out-of-home care until she was preschool age, and I walked down to the highly respected Catholic school on my block in July and she was registered and ready to begin in August. They did add another preschool class to accommodate the demand, but didn’t need a waiting list.
I checked out a few other preschools for her; none of them had waiting lists, either.
