It's been something of a roller coaster ride here at our house with daycare. As you may recall, right after our daycare provider came back to work after a bought of pneumonia, she informed us that they were building a house and were selling their house. Their new house is to be built several miles away, to where it would impractical for us to continue daycare with her. I was sad we'd be losing Meredith, but understood. Meredith told us that they had 4 months to sell their house, so we took that information and thought we'd have at least 3 months to find new daycare.
Mind you, the housing market is reportedly so slow right now, we thought we'd have plenty of time before we'd have to really get serious about this situation. Well, we were big time wrong! Sometime during the latter part of last week, Meredith's house went up on the market. Over the weekend, her realtor had an open house. According to Meredith, 3 families came through. The very 1st family came back later and offerred Meredith and her hubbie full asking price for their home. I think in this market that just doesn't happen, but it did! So they have until April 1 to get out their house. We found this out on Tuesday (less than a week after finding out that we'd have to find new daycare), when DH called to get Meredith's SS number in order to file out taxes. On Wednesday, on dropping off Grace, DH asked when Meredith was going to stop daycare. Her response was that she wanted to be done by the end of THIS week! Okay, so that means we had 5 days to find new daycare!!!
Thankfully, we'd been thinking about calling the woman down the street that has apparently had daycare in her home since we moved here over 13 years ago. We didn't know her, but knew she had a daycare in her home because every once in awhile when she had openings she hung a sign in her window. As her home sits pretty close to a main road in town, I guess that's her form of advertising. Luckily (or maybe providencially) she has the sign in her window now! So DH called her Wednesday and explained our situation, and asked her some questions. She said she'd be happy to take Grace and happy to talk to us whenever we wanted. DH called yesterday and set up an appointment for us to visit last evening. We went over after 6 which is when she closed her daycare, to see the facility and chat. I just have one word to describe her. Jean is Wonderful! She is about our age, 50 ish, and has been doing daycare for 19 years. So you know she's good. She is Christian. She has a cute dedicated room that she uses for daycare. It looks just like a daycare center. She has a fenced in backyard with playground equipment where the children can play, and she's licensed. The entire time we were there, Grace was running around laughing and smiling and really enjoying playing. She was a little shy, but really seemed to like the surroundings. I was pleasantly surprised.
During the course of our conversation, DD2 who came with us, asked her if she had a granddaughter named Txxxx, to which she replied "Why yes I do? How did you know that?" DD2 said she saw the photo of Txxxx's uncle up on the wall in his military uniform. Txxxx's uncle had come to school to talk and visit with the kid's in DD2's class before he went to Iraq. Turns out this is Jean's son and DD2 is friends with Txxxx. How funny is that?! Anyway, Jean is willing to have Gracie part time, seems to love children, has way more experience than anyone else we've ever used for daycare, and charges less per day than Meredith! God is GOOD!
We have paperwork to fill out, need to get copies of some papers, get an emergency medical permission form notorized, and then Grace can start daycare next week. This is such an answer to prayer! We had asked that we find loving, Christian daycare that's affordable in a timely manner for Gracie. And as always, God provides. Thank you Lord for being so faithful!
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