Day-care or pre-school

I recently flipped through a documentary on one of the Showtime networks about elite New York City families applying to preschools. I only saw about thirty minutes of the show, but what I saw lived up to the stories I heard in Chicago about getting kids into preschools -- school visits, interviews, applications and application fees -- sounds more like college than preschool.

I haven't had this experience in Nashville, of course, but I have encountered a problem of a similar sort -- very long wait lists at all of the desirable schools. The childcare available through the hospital is supposed to be very good, very affordable, and for me and Wes, very well located (right on campus near the hospital and Peabody). The wait list there is 9 months to a year. We've been on it three, maybe four months. The list lady said there's a small chance we'll get in for the spring. Many schools in Nashville, especially a lot of the church centers, don't take children Oliver's age or only offer care from 9am to 3pm. A Montessori school nearby has a wait that is 1-2 years and costs over $10,000 for the school year. There are other centers that are affordable, look good, and have spots open, but they're in the opposite direction of campus, which means we're driving at rush hour, morning and afternoon, through heavy traffic. Suddenly the fact that we can get to work and school in under five minutes doesn't matter.

So at some point I gave up looking for "pre-school" and just looked for "day-care." Do I wish the teachers at the school were all highly trained and experts on my child's intellectual development? Sure. But I'll take a center that's safe and loving and cares about my kid's happiness. So we found a center very close by, very affordable. It caters to a lower-income bracket, which makes for a much more mixed racial and ethnic clientele -- something I really like about the place. I'm glad for Oliver to be amongst all kinds of people, racially, ethnically, linguistically, economically. It's something we loved about Chicago, something we're more conscious about in our circle of friends, and something we want to be intentional about with our child (makes sense this is part of what I'm studying in my program).

So Oliver will not be attending, as one program billed itself, "the Princeton of preschools." But hopefully he'll be happy, meet some other fun kids to play with, and I'll be able to pick him up very soon after my day is done so we can spend plenty of mommy and Ollie time together. And that might be the best part.