My husband has been having a rough time lately with the baby now that Ruckus is on the move, so he has started thinking about going back to work. As surprised as I am that my husband no longer wants to spend his days at home playing with the baby, I can also understand how one day can bleed into the next and your sense of identity becomes a little hazy after months of just being Parent and not anything else. So I am trying to be as supportive of his choice as possible. Part of being supportive is to help solve the problems that him going back to work brings about, so we have begun searching out a person or persons who will be able to watch our little darling while we are at work.
Today we visited a daycare near my job, and I thought it was a pretty good contender. The lady who greeted us and showed us around was a very round person with a hole in her shirt and mismatched socks, and she was extremely nice and helpful and tried to answer all of our questions. Ruckus seemed to enjoy her holding him so I took this to be a good sign. She showed us first where the older children were and they all seemed reasonably happy and well adjusted as they sat at three small tables and ate their lunches. Next we were asked to take off our shoes so that we could go into the baby room.
Small stars hung off of the ceiling and little art & craft projects hung on a line to dry and await pickup by the babies' parents. There were three babies in the room. One was a large 7 month old Hispanic baby with a unibrow and a wide grin. He was fussing as we came in and an older Hispanic lady came to get him and give him a bottle. He settled right down, just as a skinny white 10 month old girl picked up the crying where he left off. She fussed and cried in an excersaucer, suspended out of reach of her caregiver who was busy with Unibrow for the next several minutes.
Another, slightly older, Hispanic girl sat in one of those tables with a chair in the middle of it, eating some kind of a snack. She didn't make a peep the whole time we were there. But she seemed happy enough.
Eventually the Hispanic lady put Unibrow down and went and soothed Skinny White Girl, and we could hear what our tour guide was saying again. Each baby gets their own crib, and their own snacks, etc. Since it is summer there is daily water play time outside, and the toys outside looked safe and clean and like fun for the little ones.
The caregiver to baby ratio is one lady to four babies so this is not too terrible, assuming they are not all on the same schedules. Should a fifth baby be added to the mix a second lady moves into the baby room to help out and thus the ratio improves greatly for all of the babies.
All in all I think it is a nice place and if my husband does decide to go back to work it will likely be where our son will be spending his days. That said, my husband looked as though he might cry and/or throw up as the tour was concluding, as the reality of it all started to set in. I am not sure he is really ready to be done with the whole stay at home dad thing after all.
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