Child care
One of the saddest parts of moving (besides the huge waste of time to pack and unpack) was taking Riley out of the Arboretum daycare. We love that daycare, and more importantly, Riley seems to love it too. The teachers are awesome and they were always doing fun things and going on walks. On her last day her teacher Liz made a huge goodbye poster for her (she says it’s the biggest she’s ever made) an gave us a photo album full of beautiful pictures of Riley and her daycare friends, plus an early mother’s day present for me, wrapped with instructions not to open it early. So nice.
Along with the daycare, we also had to say goodbye to Riley’s nanny, Maricella. Riley started going to the daycare full time a while ago, but we still saw Maricella for babysitting every now and then. She’s wonderful. She really seemed to love Riley and I trusted her completely to take good care of her. Here she is (about 8 months pregnant) on her last day taking care of Riley (before full time daycare started)…
My mom and I took Riley over to visit Maricella and her husband and new baby girl Julia Maria before we moved. Riley was very curious about the little baby…
Now that we’re in LA the big challenge is finding a new daycare. I’ve called more places then I can count, and we’ve visited a bunch, but we really fell in love with one family daycare that is less then a mile from our house. The woman who runs it, Luz, is also a gardener, and her backyard is like daycare heaven. We quickly realized she was interviewing us as much as we were interviewing her (or Sage realized and informed me), and luckily Riley was in the best of moods… sitting in her little chair doing a project, playing with the woman outside and doing her signs, she even said “agua” on the way out pointing at a water fountain. She couldn’t have been cuter. There was no spot available then, but since we didn’t really see anything else close by that we liked we decided to wait it out. I called a couple time to be sure she knew how much we liked her daycare, then we just had to wait. Luckily, a couple weeks after we visited a spot for Riley miraculously appeared! Such a relief. We visited again today and I’ll start going over there with Riley to visit till she gets comfortable next week. Luz says she is very picky about which families she accepts, and that all the families she has are pretty mellow and easy going. And she does not accept celebrity kids (apparently she turned down Bruce Springsteen because of the security issues!)
So we’re happy, and relieved. Hopefully it will really be as great as it looks!
The timing has worked out really well. It’s been nice taking care of Riley full time these last few weeks. I didn’t really have much that I had to do, so I could just focus on hanging out with her and playing. We fell into a nice routine with Sage going off to work in the morning and Riley and I walking to the park, which is about a mile away. There are cute pictures from the park that aren’t up yet, so maybe I’ll save that for another post!