More Coffee Please

I’ve crossed from vague dissatisfaction into active dislike of our current daycare.

Objectively speaking, they’re OK. They keep the kids safe and all that stuff. The location is good and the food is good and everyone’s ECE qualified and yadayadablahblahblah.

But my kid has been there for a year and four months, and in that time she’s had no fewer than four primary caregivers. One we nicknamed Ashley the Sullen (no, I haven’t changed her name to protect her). The others have been profoundly mediocre. This year — after she’d been there for an entire year — they got both her birthday and her last name wrong.

Which, so what, really, except I’ve spent the last few days getting our photo collection in order, looking through picture after picture of Maddy’s old daycare, full of beaming kids, happy staff, special events out the wazoo, kindergym, dance class, music class, swimming class…. and feeling decidedly underwhelmed by our current place.

And then today they lost Maddy’s necklace. Rather a nice one — a Christmas present. Maddy told her teacher the necklace was bothering her at rest time, so the teacher took it off and put it on a low side table and told Maddy she could have it back at the end of the day. Mistake #1: what kind of idiot takes a desirable object away from a small child, and then leaves it in easy reach?

Later, Maddy took it (Mistake #2 — Maddy’s clearly at fault here too), and was playing with it “on a shelf” with a friend, when the friend “flicked it” and somehow it vanished into a black hole or was eaten by dingoes or somesuch. Gone. Mistake #3: there were only four children in the room at the time, and the teacher didn’t notice what the two of them were doing? Given that the other two kids were on the computer, not putting each others’ eyes out or anything similarly distracting, WTF was the teacher doing?

Then, I arrive to pick Maddy up. The teacher is unapologetic about the loss, shrugging faintly and disinterestedly. “I looked under the shelf but it was dark,” she offered. Well, lady, get a fucking light. Mistake #4: This is the n-thousandth thing that has been lost at this daycare.

Our old daycare rarely lost stuff, and 1. they dealt with infants and toddlers, both notoriously prone to sudden spontaneous clothes-shedding; and 2. they were profoundly apologetic when stuff went missing. Daycares deal with kids — I understand stuff vanishes. C’est la vie, enh? But it would be nice if they’d at least try to keep track of things, and at this place they very clearly don’t, even when the missing stuff is kind of obvious. Child goes outside behatted and comes back inside unbehatted — wouldn’t you think you might notice? Ditto for jackets, socks, and shoes (!). But they just shrug.

I’ve worked in childcare, and I am quite clear about how challenging the job is. It’s a hard job, often thankless, and distinctly underpaid. From theoretically-qualified staff at a centre, though, I do expect a bare minimum of professionalism — not just passive observation and helpless shoulder-shrugging whenever anything untoward happens.

I also expect new caregivers to introduce themselves when they arrive and old ones to announce when they’re leaving, so a bunch of four-year-olds (and their parents) aren’t left managing sudden unexpected transitions.

And I do, in retrospect, think they should manage to keep my kid’s name straight.

I’ve had it up to HERE with this place.