I have been spending quite a bit of time working in the staff daycare at my church. It's an ideal situation really. I get to spend the entire day with Benjamin, I get out of the house and I make a little extra cashola for the family to boot. Generally I enjoy my time working childcare, but I will be the first to admit that almost everyday I am there provides a period of time, as brief as it may be, in which I find myself praying for strength or patience or to be teleported to another place entirely. Today was no exception.
The day was pretty busy off and on, but I was having a good time working with the kids. We read lots of stories, played kitchen, had snack, played in the gym, sang songs, read more stories, built towers, and the kids ate lunch. I sat down to start my lunch and made it about halfway through my Jimmy Johns sandwich when I realized it was just about nap time so I had better take a break from eating and get the kids ready. I was in the middle of changing diapers for naps when the sweet little baby I was caring for decided he was starting to get hungry. No problem, I thought. I'll just finish up this diaper change and start warming up his bottle. Then things got hairy. One of the older kids came up to me to say that one of the toddlers had wet through her clothes and it had gotten on his shirt. I quickly checked out the situation and determined that the toddler did not in fact wet through her clothes so much as she had another type of situation going on (you know what I mean). I called the office to get a new shirt for the older boy and decided that I had to take care of the blow-out situation right away before the mess got on anything else in the room. I could move on to getting the bottle ready for baby once I had cleaned everybody up. I won't describe the diaper situation any further except to simply say that while I was cleaning up the toddler the word "epic" came to mind. As I was trying to manage all of the mess and rock the hungry baby with my foot another toddler found my partially eaten Jimmy Johns sandwich on the table. Her interest overcame her and she climbed up onto the chair where I had been sitting and reached for it. Just as I was telling her "No, no," the sandwich slid out of her hands and onto the floor. There was shredded lettuce and tuna everywhere. I managed to help her off of the chair with one hand as I secured the child I was changing with the other hand. I moved as quickly as I could to get dirty clothes bagged, children cleaned and everybody dressed that needed to be dressed. Whew. Onto preparing baby's bottle. While warming the bottle I realized that we were 15 minutes past nap time and nobody was napping. I stopped rocking the baby for a few minutes as I got the little kids ready for nap. After rushing back to feed the baby I was somehow able to get the big kids situated for rest time. And then the chaos turned to calm while everybody happily rested and the baby ate.
This 30 minute window of time was just a small part of my day and the rest of the day went rather beautifully, but those 30 minutes were long and tiring and stressful and were a good reminder of why I'm glad I don't do daycare full-time. I worked hard for my money today, and I'd be willing to bet that your childcare provider did too, so give her a hug the next time you see her :)
1 comment:
Oh wow! That sounds like quite the day! Are you typically all by yourself in there? Hope the next time is a little less eventful!
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