In the last week, three ladies I know have had their babies. I am loving looking at the pics of these new little ones!! Makes me all teary-eyed. Then again, just about everything right now does :P
The past couple of days I have been feeling some weird little tickle/flutters when I am sitting still. Its the strangest thing EVER. But I love it :) We get to go see the baby on Thursday and I can't wait. I think I am starting to get more excited about this pregnancy. I brought home a calendar from work & shaded in my potential maternity leave. July 25th through October 14th. I plan on taking the full 12 weeks, and then I might even see if I can stretch out my vacation time to work 4 days a week the rest of the year (but still get paid for 5). If I can swing working one of those days from home, then we might be able to get MIL to watch the baby for 3 days a week.
If MIL cant watch the baby (or doesn't want to), DH and I have been looking at our daycare options. There's a center that is honestly about 1/4 mile away from our house. That's an option, but DH refuses to consider a daycare center setting (does not want bad influences around our kid...LOL...its going to be about 6 months old hun). The other option is trying to find a SAHM that wouldn't mind adding another one for a couple days a week. I like this idea the best personally. We know a couple that have 2 kids of their own & SAH. Just seems more personal than a daycare center. But we will see....
Only 6 more months to go! Seems like its going to be here really, really fast!
4 comments:
For what it's worth, I always preferred a home setting over a daycare setting for any age child.
Feeling the baby kick is the best thing about being pregnant. The little fluttering is the kicking.
I prefer a home daycare and they are much less expensive. I feel that the attention the babies get at a home daycare is better than a center. It varies by state on how many babies per child care provider. In ND, it is 4 babies per worker. That pretty much means that the babies in centers here are only held to be fed or changed.
I felt the same way when we were looking for daycare. My mom had been an in-home provider and I have all good memories and thought it was the only way to go. But we only had our kids in the home daycare for one week until we came to pick up the boys and saw an ashtray sitting out on the coffee table. No way! There are good and bad home providers and good and bad centers. For instance, I have a HS friend back home who runs an in-home daycare and she's sought after and always full. However, there's another girl I know from HS who constantly has openings and is the talk of the town bc she always posts on Facebook how much she hates the kids!
So, anyway, we found a daycare center near us and they have been great! First of all, it's a small center. Maybe 20 kids at the most with three providers always there (and always the same 4 or 5 providers, so it's stable). The kids are arranged by age, so the babies are in one room, the 12 mos - maybe 2 years in another, and the 2+ preschoolers in another. They do fun crafts, when they get in the preschool room they start doing more about letters and numbers. They have field trips sometimes, and they do holiday parties. Also, because it's such a small, close-knit center, the same kids and families attend for a long time and my kids have really made lots of friends. In fact, there's one girl who started just a few months after my boys when they were babies so they've kind of grown up together the past three years and they really are good friends.
Don't rule out one or the other. You really have to go and visit, visit again, and see how it feels when you start. We felt fine about the first home, but we also had no problems pulling our kids that very first week because of the smoking.
Also...about the "bad influences". Well, sure, there's always a bad kid, but they are babies and toddlers, so they pretty much all get along and have a lot of fun together. There are bad kids at home daycare as well. In fact, my friend's kid was the bad one for a while, he was the biter. ;-) Haha.
Aww! Such a cute post! I agree with the other posters: a home setting is so much better for the kids. We went from a daycare to a home setting during the 10 months between the end of maternity leave and me quitting. The home setting was the best and it seemed like he learned more and didn't get as sick. Before you know it, we'll be viewing YOUR cute little baby pictures! The time goes by very quickly!
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