I enjoy being the major provider for my son. But with being the major provider and having
sole custody, come hard decisions.
Decisions that I didn’t think about before he was born. I had to make the most difficult decision of
our lives about a year and half ago.
Well, the most difficult since his father and I split up anyway. I had to decide whether I wanted to put my
son in daycare or not. If I chose to enroll him in daycare, I knew I would always have someone to watch him while I worked or had doctor appointments he could not go to. On the other hand, if I decided to depend on family members, I wouldn't have to leave earlier or get home later every day and I would know without a doubt that he was safe. Although I would have been more comfortable
with him being with family all day, all week, I knew this wasn’t the best thing
for us. Despite all the what ifs that go along with any new adventure involving children: Will he like it? Will they be good to him? Will they scare him? Will they hurt him? Can I really afford to spend $400 a month on child care when I could get it free if he were at home? I had to stop thinking like a paranoid mother.
So on January 16, 2012, my son started going to daycare full
time. He was just one month and one day
shy of being a one-year-old. He was
still using a bottle and was not walking.
He hated for his mommy to have to leave him there for 8 ½ hours every
weekday. And I hated leaving him
there. I always thought when the phone
rang at work that it would be the daycare calling to say something horrible had
happened to my son. My sweet little boy,
who counted on me to protect him and keep him safe. But I never got that phone call. The first day came and went, and Kayden was
alive and well. And then the first
week. And then the first month. And then the first summer. My son was in daycare and he was okay. Him being in daycare while I worked was okay. I didn’t have to feel guilty anymore.
Sometimes I still feel guilty for leaving him when he wants
to stay with me, but I know that as soon as I walk out the door and leave him
in the owner’s arms, he will calm down and he will be just fine without
me. Most of the time now (since he is 2
½) he wants to go to daycare. He wants
to play with his friends. He talks about
the owners and the staff. About the
friends he’s made. And about his little
girlfriend. Yikes! A ladies man already, lol! He doesn’t want to leave that place to come
home. It's actually a fight to get him to the car more often than not... and he's a big boy so that's always fun, lol.
He has grown up so much in the 1 ½ years he’s been going to
daycare. He went from drinking Enfamil in a bottle to drinking milk in a cup. He went from jar baby food to adult food. He feeds himself now. He went from having no interaction with kids to having alot of interaction with kids. He went from babbling "mum" to saying "Mommy" and "Mammy." His vocabulary is amazing... as is his
memory. He can sing the entire alphabet,
can sing twinkle, twinkle little star, can count to 10, and he can even name
and show people all of his colors. He can do impressions of animals (and do them right).
He’s
a normal 2 ½ year old little boy who has learned more at daycare than he could
have learned at home. He is a social
toddler now. We no longer have birthday
parties just with his family. Now, we
have birthday parties with his friends.
He goes to birthday parties of his friends. My son is not a baby anymore. And he’s smarter than I could ever have
imagined he would be. And I can honestly say that despite the doubt and the worry that I felt every single moment he was there early on, it was (and still is) the best decision I could have made for him.
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