Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Child Care is just NOT my friend!

Luckily we're all set to start the new daycare tomorrow, and Char had fun playing at a friend's house today (gave her a run for her money, though!). So, yay for that. But I realized that, in general, child care has not been easy since day 1.

Day 1: Phone call from DCS offering us placement of 2 day old baby girl (now known as Charlotte). Problem: We both work full-time and babies aren't eligible for daycare until 6 weeks. I called several friends who are SAHM's and was about to give up, when DCS called back to say that they had a foster family who would watch Char until she was 6 weeks old.

4 weeks: Find a daycare that has space for a newborn, and they tell me I'm on the waiting list.

6 weeks: Discover that the daycare filled our spot. Frantically look for another daycare that takes the state certificate (req'd for foster families) with space for newborn, because the foster family she stayed with was going to have to stop watching her due to not having space for a carseat in their van and needing to drop their teenage daughter at band camp every day. Find a daycare, yay!

Ongoing through first year: Char's reflux caused a lot of issues with the daycare. She wouldn't eat, they didn't know how to get her to eat, she reverse-cycled and ate most of her daily formula intake at night, meaning we didn't sleep, daycare was stressed, etc. Also, in watching some of the other classrooms playing outside when doing pickups/dropoffs, I noticed that most of the teachers sat and chatted while the kids played, and essentially ignored the kids. When they did need to intervene, they shouted to/at the kids. Such as "Johnny, Kim wants to swing and you're in her way. MOVE!" rather than walking over to the children and gently guiding their behavior. Not that they were "abusing" the kids by any means, but they were not doing the kind of positive discipline I prefer, so I knew I didn't want her there past the nursery.

13 months: Found a Montessori school in my neighborhood that I really liked.

16 months: Charlotte started biting and was asked to leave the Montessori school with NO notice. DH went to drop her off at school one day and was sent home and told not to return. MIL drove 3 hours to keep Charlotte for the week while we found a nanny.

16 months: Nanny was found. She did a good job keeping Char, but became really unreliable in terms of call-offs from work, being late, etc.

27 months: Fired nanny with no notice due to ongoing lies and inability to do the job. Spent the week looking for places to send her daily and ongoing. Found a daycare where she will start.

30 months (3 months into the future): Start a different preschool.

Now, does 7 child care centers in 30 months not seem like a lot for one child? Poor kiddo! I hate it for her and feel some guilt about it, though I'm not sure what I could/would have done differently.

In funny news, I put Char to bed wearing play clothes tonight so that DH doesn't have to dress her in the morning. Dressing her seems to take FOREVER on any given day.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

48 hours of holy hell



^^This is how I feel

So, you may know that we've had some nanny issues. All was well until June (other than a few short notice cancellations and no-shows on weekends), when her car died and she couldn't pick Charlotte up from preschool (2x per week) anymore. It was supposed to be a couple of weeks. After about 6 weeks, we gave her a bonus check to help her buy a car. She still didn't buy a car, and we just kept getting lame promises all summer.

In early September, I basically laid down the law and told her she needed to get a car or have an alternative plan to get my kid home from preschool by the time we returned from vacation. She didn't. And, she didn't show up for work yesterday because she assumed she was fired. Ugh! So several hours were spent yesterday afternoon making phone calls to try to find someone to keep Char for the afternoon. DH left work at about 1:45 to pick Char up from school, and got back to work about 4:30. Ridiculousness! And where did Char end up, you ask? With a friend's FATHER. We're not just inconveniencing our friends, here, we're inconveniencing their families!

So, a back and forth conversation ensued with the nanny, and she said she assumed she was fired because she didn't have a car, and she was sorry for the inconvenience and misunderstanding. She said she really liked working for us and wanted to work for us, but she just didn't have a car yet and didn't know when she'd get one. So, we expected her today at noon.

At 11:00, I got a text message saying that she would be late because she was "still in court". And no, we had no idea she was in court, or why. Again, we had no alternatives and a couple of hours of texts, emails, and phone calls ensued to try to figure out what the hell to do! (By the way, every bit of my vacation time was taken last week, so leaving work is not an option for either of us). In the end, DH picked her up at the courthouse.

And then we did a search on why she was in court. Apparently it was a 2nd offense of driving on a suspended license. This is why she didn't have a car! So, all these weeks we've been strung along, she was most likely lying to us all along by telling us she'd have a car soon. Needless to say, I fired her tonight. Her claim is that she didn't know her license was suspended until she got to court. I don't see how this is even possible. At one point over the summer, she missed 3 days of work because she had borrowed her brother's car and then had a wreck. My guess is that the police at the scene discovered her license was suspended and that's why she ended up in court today. So I know the police at the scene would have told her that her license was suspended. They may even have arrested her at the time. So, another lie. I feel so used.

The good news is that I found a daycare facility near where I work that has immediate openings. It's a preschool type daycare of the traditional variety, so not exactly what we wanted long-term, but short-term it will be fine. We're going to check it out tomorrow to do a tour, but I know someone whose kid goes there and I have no doubt they're fine. They're a 3-star facility (the state of TN has a 3-star program), blah blah. So, with any luck, Char will be starting there on Thursday. Tomorrow, we're inconveniencing a friend but hopefully not her whole extended family lol.

And, the topping on my shit sundae was when I let my dog out of his kennel to find he'd pooped in it. Then he came back inside after I let him out and puked 2 huge nasty puddles in the living room. (By the way, DH steam cleaned the entire living room yesterday - ugh!). NOT COOL!

Saturday, September 24, 2011

An overall trip review

I was really happy with the trip, and I think the rest of the family were, too! We stayed at the Caribe Hilton hotel in San Juan, which touts itself as the only beachfront resort in San Juan proper, and also the place the Pina Colada was invented 50-something years ago.

We stayed in a one-bedroom garden-view suite. Even though it was technically garden-view, we were on the 5th floor and we had a view of the ocean over the tree tops. Pretty neat! We were also at the very end of the hall with only one neighbor (whose room was adjacent only to the grown-ups' bedroom), so I didn't feel like I had to keep Char quiet the whole time. The first day or two I'm pretty sure no one was even in that room, and after that there was a little boy about Char's age, so it's not like he was perfectly quiet either. So that helped, too. The room was pretty big, like a decent-sized one-bedroom city apartment. One bedroom with a queen bed, a living room with a pull-out sofa, a big dining room table, a small kitchenette with mini-fridge and microwave and more cabinets than we needed for sure, and 1 1/2 bathrooms. Also a balcony leading out from the living room and bedroom, but we kept the doors closed and locked (and in the living room, blocked) just in case. We only used it to dry our swimsuits (which didn't really work because of the humidity). I wouldn't change a thing about our room (except maybe the windows in the dining room which let in too much light and made poor Char wake at 6:30 every day).

The rest of the hotel was really nice, too. They had all the things you'd expect a resort to have, including several very nice pools, swim-up bar, fitness room, playground and kids' room, protected beach, boardwalk, sea walk, spa, and even an old fort! There were several restaurants on-site, but I must say none of them that we tried were very good, and they were all EXTREMELY overpriced. Think $22 for an individual pizza! So, instead we ordered Domino's. It took a whole hour on the internet to find a phone number, plus a phone call to somewhere in the middle of Puerto Rico at least 100 miles from San Juan (whoopsies!), but we got pizza! We had Subway another night, which was around the corner. Leftover Domino's another night, and Sofia's in OSJ the last night. Breakfast and lunch were a combination of Starbucks and in-room food (DH took a taxi to Walgreen's one night, LMAO).

Which begs my only other criticism of the hotel; it's not very close to any restaurants or stores. It's pretty much right next to a big park, which is kind of cool, but it's just the other half of the protected beach from the hotel, so we didn't really see a point in going there. There's a Subway, a bodega, and that's about it.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Just a few more pictures









Yes, I am wearing that shirt because I got sunburned. Day 1, no sunburn. Day 2, BAD sunburn (but only right along my tan lines; I guess the 2 identical swimsuits I own aren't actually identical). Day 3, no sunburn. Day 4, sunburn.


Char got tanned. A lot of tan. Her hair also got lighter, which makes me wonder how dark it will get this winter when she's not in the sun much. But yeah, she left looking like a blonde goddess and I left looking like a bright red potato. AND I have an ear infection and a bladder infection. BUT this is why my husband rocks: The last night in PR, he went on a mission to find me cranberry juice. No luck. So he went to the bar and bought the entire cranberry juice bottle for like $20. LOL. Hooray! My hero!



Old San Juan

Tuesday afternoon, we decided to catch the bus to Old San Juan. Unfortunately, city buses don't go all the way into OSJ because they could damage the amazing blue cobblestones (picture somewhere down below), and it's quite a hike mostly uphill (really? uphill to the ocean? who'd have thought????) to some of the best attractions. Turns out there's a trolley, but we ended up on the wrong street and never saw it.

Also, Tuesday while Char napped, it rained. A lot. And the rain merely brings out the humidity. And holy moly is it humid in Puerto Rico! I mean, I've lived my whole life in Tennessee, where they say it's not the heat, it's the humidity, but I've never seen anything quite like it. It was only in the 80's but it felt at least 100 after a rain! The only good thing about the humidity is that it made Charlotte's hair curl up GORGEOUSLY! By the time we walked all the way down to the end of the islet and explored El Morro, we were done. We hopped a taxi back to the hotel. Best $15 we ever spent!

I apologize for these pictures being out of order. In fact, they're essentially backward, because that's what Blogger does. Sigh.

El Morro lighthouse


View of Old San Juan and the north shore from the grounds of El Morro.


El Morro turret.



These steps may not have slowed Charlotte down, but they sure wore my fat butt out!



I kind of like this one! I would have rather made the aperture smaller so that DH and Char would be in focus better, but it was getting late-ish so the light was getting poorer and poorer, so some of these shots reflect that I had to use f-14 and less.



Peering through the binoculars with the El Morro lighthouse in the background.



An city wall to OSJ. These old walls were so cool, with plants growing out of them at odd places.



Just a cute picture of Char outside El Morro (it has a very large, mostly flat-ish piece of land in front that is like a big park. Lots of locals having picnics and whatnot). In my exhaustion, I named the picture for the building in the background "yello building". LOL




Char exploring a turret.


LOVE! Wish I would have taken more time to adjust the focus so that I could have a companion shot of her in focus and the front not, but she ran out pretty quickly.




Again, LOVE this picture of her dancing. That's the port of San Juan in the background, which El Morro was built to protect the entrance to.



These 2 were inside an enclosed circular staircase thing. Thankfully, she never noticed the staircase, because it looked just like going down into a dungeon in movies!




Just a pic outside El Morro.



Because, who DOESN'T need a picture of their 2 year old riding a 500-year-old cannon?



The amazing blue brick cobblestones from OSJ. So cool to think they're nearly 500 years old!


Grounds of El Morro



DH wearing Char. Love the hair!



Walking down the path outside the city walls along the sea.



On a staircase above the main gate to the city.



A cool fountain.


Also, we did go back to OSJ on Thursday night for dinner. It was dusk when we left, and the city was starting to come alive with nightlife, which was pretty cool. We got our picture taken with 3 parrots (Char was SO excited to "touch the carrot, mommy") which I will scan and upload at some point. We ate at Sofia's, which had great Italian food. The only decent food (outside of Starbucks) we had while there!

Some pictures































Day 2. It will probably take me many tries to upload them all because Blogger sucks at uploading pics.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Day 1 Pictures









Travel Day

Yesterday was the travel day. I was worried to death because Char did NOT sleep well, as I think I mentioned. She was up at 4 am and really didn't go back to sleep except very briefly, and woke at her normal time. I think she must have been excited to go "way up high in an airplane".

Predictibly, she didn't nap in the airports. We started out with a leg just to Atlanta, which is normally an hour flight. The captain came on the PA and said we had a 60 minute flight delay. Ugh!!!! Turned out less than that, and Char handled it fine. It was the airport before and after the flight that was the big worry, and she was indeed overstimulated and very excited about all the people, sights, sounds, etc. At one point she was holding her ears as the people mover machine went by. Poor girly! The second flight from Atlanta to San Juan was much longer, about 3 hours, and she was a trooper almost the whole way. The last 30 or 40 minutes were tough on her, and she fussed and cried a bit before napping for all of 2 minutes, and woke crying again, but calmed a little with the television on the airplane. We were over the wings and the engine noise was pretty loud, so I don't really think she disturbed anyone too much, thankfully.

Amazingly, she came to the hotel and took a bath and went right to bed at about 9:30 or 10 local time, which is 7:30 or 8 our time. She woke about an hour later crying, and I reminded her that we were right here and she was safe, and she slept until 6:30 local time. So basically she's gone to bed at normal time and awakened an hour or two early for 2 days in a row, plus missed a nap. As you can imagine, her temper has been shorter than normal (and DH and I are very tired, too, so that doesn't help), but she's doing pretty well. I'll post some pics from Day 1 in a second.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

This does not bode well!

In approximately 4 hours, we will be leaving on a jet plane to Puerto Rico! And, in my usual fashion, I was beyond thrilled 2 or 3 months ago when we booked it, but now I'm nervous as can be. I've been stressing about Charlotte not sleeping while we're there, throwing her into an overtired cycle of whininess, clinginess, and of course night wakings that can last a month or more. She's so sensitive that when her sleep is disturbed, not one night but 2-3 in a row, it literally takes a month before she's usually back to normal. The last time (the only time) I took her to a hotel, it was a disaster (as those who've been reading this blog for more than 6 months probably remember). It led directly to toddler bed transition hell, but since then and when she gave up the paci not long after, she's been doing well.

Last night, the night she REALLY needed to sleep well, she didn't. She woke at 4 am crying. Now, if she wakes and fusses, or cries out a little, she usually settles herself pretty quickly. This was a "Help! Help! I've had a nightmare and I really NEED someone to comfort me!" cry. So, being the selfish moron that I am, I asked DH to go to her, forgetting that he's not usually the most successful at getting her back to sleep. Usually I can go up, rock her and sing the 4 verses of "You Are My Sunshine", and put her back down calm, and she'll go back to sleep. I'm not saying that necessarily would have happened if I'd gone, but it definitely didn't happen last night!

I barely catnapped between her cries, which seemed to have 3 of them within 90 minutes. At 5:30, I got up to go to her, and I rocked her and sang and explained that she needed to go back to sleep, and left her happy. She was fine until I got downstairs and a hair before I shut the bathroom door to pee my brains out. When I came out, I tried singing to her over the intercom, which usually works. It didn't. I tried telling her that I understood she needed to cry, but that she needed to try to be a *little* quieter so I can sing, because I can't sing if she's quite so loud. It would work for about 1/2 a verse, then she'd be wailing again, so naturally I went to her. She never could (or would) use her words to tell me what was wrong, so I lay down in the big bed in her room and let her fall asleep again (it took until 7 am before I was certain she was asleep enough for me to exit stage left), and came downstairs to take a bath.

20 minutes later, she was wailing again. This time, I told her over the intercom that I was sorry she was sad, but that I was busy in the bathtub and couldn't come to her, and asked her to cuddle her monkey and I'd come get her when I wasn't busy. Miraculously, it worked. Still... it was a long night with far less sleep than she really needs, and we have a LONG day ahead of us in overstimulating airports, millions of new things to see and smell and explore, and I'm scared to death she won't sleep tonight in Puerto Rico.

Friday, September 16, 2011

You don't know what you're saying!

This one comes from Dada. Charlotte goes to pre-school on Mondays and Fridays, and she invariably sleeps later those days lol, making it hard to get ready for school. DH gets her ready every morning since I'm already at work. Today, they had an interesting conversation:

Dada: Charlotte, we need to hurry and get dressed. Let me get some clothes for you.

(Charlotte sits down in her rocking chair and observes Daddy searching through drawers and muttering)


Char: What’s wrong, Daddy?


Dada: Oh, I can’t find your purple shirt.


Char: Purple shirt?


Dada: Yes, your purple shirt. It would look go well with this…you always look good wearing it…I love that purple shirt…It’s almost like a friend.


Char: Daddy, what are you saying? You don’t know what you’re saying!


I swear, this child!

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Conversations

Okay, someone please explain to me how my REAR-FACING toddler can still be a backseat driver?

Last night, we went swimming after work, and had a conversation that went something like this:

Char: Mommy?
Me: Yes, sweetheart?
Char: I love you so much!
Me: Awwww! I love you, too!
Char: Oh no!
Me: What's wrong, sweetie?
Char: You stopped the car!
Me: There's a red light, so I have to stop the car. We'll go again as soon as the light turns green.
Char: I need to go potty! I go potty in my car seat. I go potty in my pants.
Me: Pee pee goes in the potty. Please try to hold it until we get home. We'll be home soon.
Char: Look, mommy! It's green! You can go now. Go, mommy! Move the car!
Me: I know some cars are going past us but that's because they're going straight. The left turn lane light is still red. How old are you again?
Char: I'm 2, mommy!

Monday, September 5, 2011

This post brought to you by...

my Mother-In-Law's awful taste in toddler clothing. She gave Char a 95% polyester warmup suit that very much looks 80's (or, at best, 90's), a red sweater with cats and a VERY large collar, and more clothes that generally look like a 55-year-old woman might have worn in 1985.

And thus, a re-enactment of the opening theme song and credits to "Murder, She Wrote" was born: