Searching for child care, round 1

This is my second post in a series on finding child care.

As I mentioned in my first post on this subject, we have now done the child care search three times.

The first time was while I was pregnant and, later, on maternity leave. At the time, we were living in a 1100 square foot condo that had basically three rooms -- the master bedroom, Littles' bedroom, and the main living area, which included my office. Consequently, I did not consider any type of care in our home, because I figured it would be too distracting to have Littles spending her days just a few feet away from where I was trying to work. (In retrospect, I was absolutely right on this.)

I did not really consider in-home daycares, stay-at-home moms, etc. either. I don't really remember why. Part of it might have been that I couldn't imagine trusting someone who was completely alone (i.e. no other adults) with my child all day.

So that left daycare centers as the only remaining option. I started with the list of centers that provided discounts through my employer, and called to schedule some visits.

I didn't really have a list of questions that I asked. I quickly found that I just had to listen to my gut. Some places, I immediately felt at ease and comfortable. Others just never felt right. Sadly, this included the center that was by far the most convenient, just a quarter mile away from our house and offering a 20% discount through our employer. But if it's not right, it's not right, and that place did not feel right at all.

I ended up finding two places that I liked. One was a Kindercare facility, about a 10 minute drive from our house -- Kindercare is a huge national chain with many many facilities. The other was a non-chain daycare called Future Assets.

I liked the Kindercare facility, but I loved Future Assets. Even now, 1.5 years after my first visit, it stands out as probably the best daycare I've ever visited. Unfortunately, we got hung up on the terms for reserving a space for Littles. Kindercare wanted a non-refundable $25 application fee to put her on the waiting list -- totally reasonable. Future Assets wanted a $100 application fee plus first and last months' tuition. That came out to almost $3000, all non-refundable!

So we decided to put Littles on the waiting list at Kindercare (we did this about two months before she was born) and to cross our fingers that Future Assets would still have a spot if we felt it was the right place to be as my return-to-work date drew closer.

That ended up being a fantastic decision. When Littles was about two months old, our landlord sold our condo, meaning that we had to move. Hubby's office was about a 45 minute drive from that condo, so we decided to move closer to his office. Of course, that meant that neither the Kindercare we had looked at nor Future Assets made sense as child care options. Good thing we didn't put down $3000 non-refundable at Future Assets!

So, we started the child care search again...