date: Fri 28 Aug 2026 09:23:08 PM PDT subj: Daycare a new chapter in twin's lives ------------------------------------------------------ What a day today. Our best intentions with all the planning and preparations, for somethings still doesn't prepare a person walking into their unknowns and the reality they succumb to. Up until today our children have primarily been cared for by us (their parents), and their nanny. Thursday was the nanny's last day. As I worked that day, I heard her playing with the kids. The sounds I heard made me emotional. I messaged my wife at work "I hope she is having a fun day." I couldn't help but think 'Am I doing the right thing?' I'll don't know. Their nanny has been seeing our kids for the most part every week since they were three months old. Each morning she is happy and cheerful when she greets them. It was my decision to send our children to daycare. The sounds of laughter and playing, is what I heard coming from my children's room. Their nanny and my children, the three of them having so much fun. As I worked, all I could think of is how I might have taken days like this from her and my children. My reasons are practice, we need care each day, stability, reliability. My wife and I work, and our jobs demand we are reliable, and dependable. In the past no fault to the nanny, she could not come to care for the babes. At those times, we have to either not go to work, or find backup care. In our society and economy not working for us, is not an option. Even though most of our money is spent on childcare and living expenses, we are better off paying for childcare compared to one of us not working. So like most families we have to work and pay for childcare, without surprises. I thought daycare would be the solution. Our first day was not what we expected for our babes. My wife prepared everything we needed the night before. I'll be the parent taking our children to daycare and picking them up. Today both of us are taking them, but I tried to do what I would do if it was just dad, getting them ready in the morning, and driving them to daycare. It started out with getting them out of bed, changing their diapers, and feeding them breakfast. Putting them in their highchairs for breakfast I already feel behind. They are not used to this routine, and they are not quite hungry yet. They hardly touched their food, but we have to go. I hope they aren't going to be hungry. Load up the babes in the car, and off we all go. The drive was easy, and we arrive, not knowing how to get into the place, we were lucky to tailgate with another parent. As my wife walks in, the young lady working there puts her hands on side of her face, and opens her mouth. She is truly in shock about us brining our children in the doors. She doesn't seem to know what is going on with us, nor can she tell us what we should be doing. It was shocking to experience. Here we are trying to drop off our children, and the person working there doesn't know where our children should go, or how old 16 months is in terms of years. Its OK I barely know myself, but its just disorienting as a parent. My instinct is, get out! Get out of here! We are in the wrong place, I made a mistake. I fight against my instincts, try to calm down as my wife interacts with the young lady. She seems nice, and as she apologizes, I empathize with her, but we still need to know what to do and we are not getting answers that help us. We put down our children, and try to help the lady help us. The place smells of bleach, and I walk into the room she thinks our children are going to be in later when the other teachers arrive. I see the cleaning supplies out on the counter. I ask my wife "Do you smell the chemicals? Smells like bleach." I go to the window and open it. Shortly after a couple more people arrive. Someone who can help us a little. One of the ladies seems like she knows what is going on and can explain things to my wife as I listen. We are settled a bit, until just before we walk out, our son drops a toy he had, and it comes apart like a puzzle. Little balls the kind 16 month year olds like to put in their mouth an choke on roll on the floor. I see my daughter has another toy that is small enough for her to choke on. Our babes are in a room with three years and up. Their toys are different. We leave and as we drive home, have little to say that is positive. I say "I hope they have training how to deal with children choking on toys." WE are not happy. --------------------------------- We rush to pick up the children. If you don't get your children on time, there is a twenty-five dollar penalty, one dollar a minute, and five dollars a day fee. This is what the website says. Who knows how that works. As I rush in stopped traffic, I try to work it out in my mind. 'Huh?' is about as much as I can come up with. We made it with one minute to spare. As my wife and I smile and laugh happy we made it just in time we enter the code to get into the place. We're inside talking to a young lady who knows what is going on, which is nice compared to our experience in the morning during drop-off. We show our IDs to prove we are the parents of someone's children. Two minutes later after the required time to pick up the children it seems everyone arrived to collect their children. The teacher who was watching our children seemed like a light bulb that when you talk to the person, the light goes out. I watch her as my wife asked about our son. She pauses for awhile kinda like the robot in the movie hitch hikers guide to the galaxy, turning her head in slow motion she looks at our son and says very slowly "he likes to play individually." Which came as a shock to me, because when we dropped him off, he was playing amongst the other children even the older ones. As evil as I am, I know its there, I think in an evil way, fighting against it, 'are you on right now? You are human turn on.' I can only imagine how hard it is to be a teacher of all these little people all day long, but the evil parent with expectations is assessing if I've made the wrong decision to have my children enrolled in this daycare. An assessment with practical reasons like affordability, availability, flexibility, and the miser in me is over powering the carefree person who died twenty years ago in life's beat-downs from getting myself into the wrong situations. At this point I just need to get out of here, like the other parents. I do our best to collect my child's things, holding my son on the verge of crying, I do something which signaled my wife time to walk out. We load up the children and as we load them up my wife starts expressing things not positive. As she loads up our daughter she says "What is this?" gesturing at our daughters onesie sticking out from under her jacket. "They are still wearing their jackets." When I saw the onesie I thought, 'they didn't even dress our child correctly after changing her.' We drive away, and my wife is already looking to put us back on the waiting list of the other daycare we tried to get into before this one, but they are finalizing their building. Later after we are at home my wife can't let some of the things she experienced go, and if she talks about it she gets upset. I completely understand. We paid a lot for our nanny and our nanny brought a level of care inline with my wife's expectations. We don't have the highest expectations, but seems today we experienced something unexpected together. As I told my neighbor the night before, "We just won't know if going to daycare is the right thing to do until we try it." Lets hope Monday is better than Friday. Is this just how daycare is now days in the Pacific NorthWest? Maybe its like this everywhere. One thing we didn't think about before having a child was childcare. We didn't expect the economy to take a turd dive into the shit hole. I never experienced anything like this growing that I could remember as a child, I know that isn't reliable, but as an adult I haven't experienced it until now. You don't know what you have until its gone.