Daycare v. Nanny

I will return to full time work in just a little over 90 days and I have NO CHILDCARE for one of my children. My daughter started at a full time program earlier this month and so far she likes it there. Not that she tells me what she's doing or anything. Like it's any of my business?

My baby son, for whom I believe daycare can be a huge plus*, for him I got nothin'. Apart from the standard dry lines of wait list positions and blathering banter of program directors and family daycare operators who can't tell me anything. The search makes my heart ache. I always feel like an alarm will suddenly ring and I will have to go to the office and leave my near-infant child to lie in a alleyway whilst I toil and fret just to make a living.

Soon I will get the new centres list and hit the phone lines again. If there are no new facilities opening it is a complete crapshoot, a crop of fresh frustration. I will curse and spit and cry and throw fallopian tubed shaped darts at big posters of Stephen Harper and Premier Campbell. Nothing will be sure and at best I will shit some horseshoe like last time and come up with a decent, or even good, place for my kid.

I live in the city. It is nice I can walk to the store and take the bus but ... everyone wants daycare here! Bastards. No one has good choices. A spot can cost the earth even when it's awful half the time. Due diligence and wait lists mean nothing since half the centres are chucking out their lists as the process is too onerous for them to maintain. The wait lists have never really worked anyway because no one ever takes themselves off a wait list... Once you factor in the refuse-no-sibling policy plus stuff like reality and timing wait lists are a complete artifice.

Hear the swoosh another dart before it pierces a large poster of a metaphorical image entitled "Personal Cost".

And it must be asked would I feel better about it or worse if I was sure that daycare was what worked for the whole family anyway? Or should I just get a nanny and give it a rest?

In our next installment of Child Care Search : Tales from Primary Caregiver Hell... Daycare v. Preschool: Nannies Revisited

* at this juncture in my experience I am of the opinion that daycare is very advantageous for children age 11-20 months. For ages 36+ months not so much.