Fingers Crossed

I got a phone call from an unknown number today. As is almost always the case when this happens (especially on my cell during work hours), I didn't answer. When I checked my messages on the way home, I found that the unknown caller was a home daycare provider only a few blocks away from my house calling to tell me that she had talked to GH a while back, wanted to let us know that she would have some openings in the fall, and would like us to come by for a visit if we were still interested.

Um, YES, we are very much still interested!

After some fruitless searching a couple of months ago, we'd let the whole daycare thing drop. We'd called every licensed home daycare in our town to no avail, and we'd visited the two centers that take infants and gotten on both waitlists (even though they were both WAY out of our price range). We'd decided that probably having a nanny come to the house was going to work best, but it's generally hard to hire nannies six months out, so we'd decided to table the nanny search until my maternity leave and GH's summer vacation from school in August.

The nanny thing has advantages and disadvantages, of course. You don't have to take your kids anywhere in the morning, which is awesome, but you rely solely on one person who can get sick, decide to leave with no warning, or turn out to be a freak despite your screening and interviews. And you have to take the whole screening thing upon yourself unless you're willing to pay multi-thousand dollar fees to nanny placement agencies.

Of course, there are no guarantees in home daycare or daycare centers, either, but there are licensing requirements that help alleviate some fears. And if a place has been in business for a long time and you can talk to parents who have had their kids there, that's always reassuring.

In any case, this woman who called has been in business for 26 years. She works with her daughter and her daughter's mother-in-law. The twins would be the only infants there; not sure how many other kids attend. I'm visiting next Wednesday. I would love, love, love to have the daycare situation set up before I go on maternity leave and not have it hanging over my head. My fingers are crossed that I'm being watched out for and that this is the answer to my daycare problems, at least for now.