Searching for child care, round 2

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

As I explained in my last post on this subject, we put Littles on a waiting list at a daycare center while I was pregnant, but ended up moving away from that area shortly before the end of my maternity leave. This meant that we had to start the daycare search all over again.

Once again, I started looking at daycare centers that offered a discount through my employer. I visited two, and was not terribly impressed.

But this time around, I was willing to consider options other than a daycare center. Our new home would be an 1800 square foot townhouse, much bigger than our old condo, and it would have a third bedroom that I would use as my office. So having someone come to our home was now an option. In addition, I had a clearer picture of what I would be doing when I returned to work, and I knew I'd be working from home quite a bit. This made the idea of having a caregiver in our home even more appealing.

Still, we could not afford a nanny. But late one night, I got the idea to look on craigslist for a nanny share. Amazingly, I immediately located not one but two nanny share options in our new location! (I am still amazed by my luck that evening. Good nanny shares are tough to find on craigslist.) I emailed both to set up meetings.

The first family had a daughter named Dani, who was almost two years old at the time. They had tried some daycares initially, when Dani was about six months old, but didn't like any of them and eventually decided to bite the bullet and hire a nanny. They found Maria and loved her, but realized that they couldn't afford her. So they started sharing with another family. The mom in the other family had recently been laid off and had decided to stay at home with her son, so Dani's family was looking for another family to share Maria with.

The second family had a son named Evan, who was in the infant room at one of the local daycare centers. Since he was almost a year old, he was getting ready to move up to the toddler room, and his parents did not like what they'd seen of that room. So they talked to Jennifer, one of the teachers in the infant room, about nannying for them (which I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to do with your daycare teachers, but that wasn't our problem...), and were looking to find another family to share Jennifer with.

Hubby and I both met with each family and the prospective nanny together. I didn't have any pre-defined questions to ask -- I had asked some basic questions of each family over email, such as the age of the other child, what the nanny was like, and the cost. I mostly wanted to see whether I felt comfortable with the situation or not.

Littles devised her own test, as only a two-month-old can do: She took an enormous poop during both meetings. The differences were telling.

Dani's family heard the poop and immediately offered up their changing table to us. Hubby took Littles back to the changing table. Unprompted, Maria followed him, and pitched in to help with the diaper.

If Evan's family heard the poop (which is likely, because it was pretty loud), they didn't acknowledge it. Littles was sitting in Hubby's lap, and I could see him nervously shifting her around, looking to see if she was leaking. Since it was getting towards the end of the meeting anyway, we said that Littles had a dirty diaper and we better get going. Evan's mom and dad just said, "Oh, OK." No offers to help.

As we changed Littles' diaper, Hubby and I quickly agreed that we felt far more comfortable with Dani's family. We called them the next day to say, "Let's do it."