Well, we couldn’t do it. Today is Andrew’s first day back at work, and instead of Nathan being in childcare I am at home looking after him.

Andrew took Nathan to the childcare place yesterday for a ‘play date’ which was supposed to be to let him get used to the people and babies there. Andrew hated the place. One baby was being held while a carer was shovelling puree into the mouth of another one. The babies that were awake but not being attended to were strapped into bouncers, some babies were asleep in the cots and one baby spent 15 minutes screaming in his cot because there was noone to comfort him. There were supposed to be two people looking after the baby room, but one runs the place and was forever running in and out of the room. Andrew told them that we don’t feed Nathan purees, and so he was offered a chunk of apple! No, Nathan doesn’t eat puree, but he does still eat age appropriate foods (except for the chili sausage Andrew tried him on last night and which he hated!) and uncooked apple is not age appropriate!

They had told me that they follow our routines, but it was obvious that there weren’t enough hands available to spend time rocking Nathan to sleep for starters! The lady there told Andrew that most babies don’t sleep for the first few weeks!!! They supplied their own disposable nappies, and changed them on a schedule, and they used commercially available wipes. Andrew told them they can’t use them on Nathan (as he reacts to them) and said we just use a cloth and water, and they said we’d have to supply the cloths, which is fine with me if I could be sure they’d use them!

So we both had visions of our 8 month old son, who has been used to having his needs met promptly and is crawling like a trooper and standing and being active all his waking moments, being left in the cot to cry, being strapped into a bouncer while awake and not being attended to, and generally not being cared for or even stimulated. I went to talk to my direct supervisor at work about it, and ended up crying my eyes out to our business manager. I decided then and there that there was no way he was going to childcare today, and Andrew admitted to me later that he had decided if I insisted that he go to childcare that he would have taken a sick day or something and looked after him.

So, I guess we are back to trying to find someone to care for Nathan while we are at work. I can see it’s not going to be easy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 8:28 am and is filed under Nathan's first year. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.