Adventures in Childcare- Part 2

My last post on childcare talked about how we selected our first childcare provider, Jessica. The arrangement we set up was that Jessica would watch Baby B for 4 days per week at a flat rate of $40 per day. This seemed like a bargain to us since he was going to be the only child she watched besides her own son, but we weren't going to argue and figured that if the arrangement worked out we would give her a raise in a few months.

Before I get into what went wrong with this arrangement, I'll talk about what was good with it:

• Baby B got a lot of attention with Jessica. She was very doting, and he was always clean and happy when we picked him up.
• Her house was spotless.
• Her kids were very well-behaved, and her 3-year-old son was very gentle with Baby B.
• It was an easy transition for Baby B, since it wasn't too different of an environment than home.
• When her kids were sick, she would let us know so that we could keep Baby B home if we wanted to.
• Our arrangement was very flexible. We didn't have to pay her for days that we didn't use her.

So, what went wrong? Well, there were little things from the beginning that weren't ideal, but none of these would have been enough to make us switch childcare providers since no arrangement is going to be perfect. Some of these little things were:

• Driving. Since Jessica had to pick up her older child from school, she had to drive with Baby B. We were aware of this when we hired her, so it obviously wasn't too big of a concern for us. My only issue is that she would take the carseat base out of her car every weekend, so I was always concerned that it wasn't installed properly. Paranoid, I know, but he's my baby!
• Wasted breast milk. I think you have to be a working mother to understand how tough it is to exclusively breastfeed while working. The first month of getting into a routine and making sure you're pumping enough to keep up with what your baby is eating is going to be difficult no matter what. Having a childcare provider who would not work with me at all on this made the situation even more challenging. I asked Jessica to hold off on giving Baby B a bottle if possible for the 30 minutes before I picked him up. Obviously, I wasn't asking her to let him scream for a half hour, but if he was showing some early hunger signs I wanted her to give him a pacifier and distract him so that I could nurse him when I got there. I even got in the habit of calling her when I was leaving the office to remind her. However, it was a common occurrence for me to show up and find out that she had just defrosted a bottle of frozen milk. On quite of few of those occasions, Baby B wasn't even hungry and, since defrosted milk has to be used within an hour, my "precious milk" (as The Husband calls it) would go to waste.
• Money. When I started back to work, my plan was to go back to work 20 hours per week (8 hours Tuesday and Thursday, 4 hours Wednesday) for the first two weeks and then 30 hours per week (Monday through Thursday) after that. Two weeks into the job (on the evening after my first Monday back at work), Jessica called me in the evening to let me know that she could no longer watch Baby B for $40/day and would need a $10/day raise in order to continue watching him. Her justification is that $40/day was not a fair rate and that she had been getting offers to clean houses and could make more money doing that. At this point, we thought she was doing a good job with the baby and that the level of care he was receiving was worth the extra money. My issue with this is that it is completely unprofessional to demand a 20% raise two weeks into a job. It's not like we were leaving Baby B with her for more hours than agreed upon (if anything, we were leaving him for less hours than we originally discussed).
  

Now, here are the big things that ultimately caused us to switch childcare providers:

• Reliability. In the 40 days total that Jessica was supposed to watch Baby B, she couldn't watch him on 10 due to personal issues (mostly her own children's illnesses). First, her younger son had a bad cold. Then a couple weeks later, she called me two hours after I dropped off Baby B freaking out because she discovered that her older son had lice. Then, she got a sinus infection and called in sick every day for a week (actually, on the last day of the week she didn't even bother to call). I realize that, for most people, this alone would be reason to switch childcare providers, but I'm fortunate enough to have a very flexible job, a wonderful best friend who works nights, and parents who live nearby and also have flexible jobs. Still, having constant childcare issues made it hard to get my billable hours in, and I was worried that if this pattern continued my boss would get irritated and the quality of my work would be affected.
  
• Unwillingness to follow our instructions. Ultimately, The Husband and I decided to switch childcare providers because Jessica refused to follow our instructions on what we consider to be a big thing- safe sleeping. When Baby B started with Jessica, he was 2 1/2 months old and was still sleeping in his Pack n Play in our room. We bought the same Pack n Play and sheet for Jessica's house that we had at home. But, a month in, Jessica mentioned in casual conversation that she was putting Baby B to sleep on her son's bed instead of in his Pack n Play. I was not okay with this- I thought it was a safety issue since Baby B was already rolling over at this point and I wanted Baby B to develop healthy sleep habits. I asked her to start putting him in his Pack n Play for naps, and she simply would not do it. One day in, she started complaining that he wouldn't sleep in his Pack n Play and that she had to put him back on her son's bed. Three days in, she complained that, "Baby B wouldn't nap for long in his Pack n Play and that this was taking away from her time with her son" and said she let him sleep on the couch instead. At this point, we started looking for new childcare providers. This coincided with her full week of calling in sick, which accelerated our search.

That's all for tonight. The Husband and I are actually going out for once to grab a beer and shoot some pool (a VERY rare occurrence). Next time, I'll talk about our childcare search the second time around and our new childcare provider.