It was the dreaded four-letter word I hate – “fine”. It was early afternoon on a weekday, and I sent a quick text message to my childcare provider to see how the baby was doing. After one or two more questions with equally short answers, I realized I was going to have to play the 20 questions game to get the information I wanted.
This is due in part because “childcare” actually means my husband and my family. And for many of them, it’s the first time in a long time they’ve had to care for a baby all day. Due to COVID, we were able to keep the baby home longer, which I’m really grateful for in many ways. But it did delay us from getting started on any type of regular childcare. This means everyone involved, baby included, were experiencing a sharp learning curve in the middle of May.
Day after day I felt like I was drilling our parents for information on the baby. If my husband picked her up, I was drilling him for this same info, expecting he had asked the questions before he left. It only took him one time to figure out he was going to need to ask A LOT more questions.
I was well aware I was coming off like the crazy mom, and I felt totally entitled to do it! But I was concerned about making our parents feel like I didn’t trust them or think they were doing a good job with childcare, which was totally not the case. I had to help them understand two things.
First, on the days they watched her, they were taking my place, so to speak. They were holding her, feeding her, changing her, etc. They were watching new discoveries. They were hearing belly laughs or wiping away tears. As mamas, this is our constant struggle – the one of needing and sometimes wanting to get away, only to fear what we may miss while we’re gone and counting down the minutes until we’re together again. Especially early on when everything is new and there are a lot of firsts, every minute feels so huge. So when you’re a working mom and gone from 8 a.m. – 5 p.m., there are a lot of missed minutes. By getting the blow-by-blow from my parents, I felt a little less like I missed as much.
Second, I was picking up where they left off. And the kind of day they had with the baby would dictate the night I would have – dinner, bath, and sleep. Did she get good naps during the day or was she going to be a bear when she got home? What did she eat? Let’s get those diaper details! I want to know what I’m walking into so I can prepare to some degree.
For good measure, there is a third element to this that plays off the second. I wanted my parents to know what kind of baby I was dropping off in the morning to help them know what kind of day they might have. Did she sleep through the night or was she up a bunch? What time did she get up as that would impact when she’d be ready for her first nap? What did she have for dinner or breakfast? Were there any new things she was doing or trying that they should watch out for?
Many daycares do what they call a Childcare Daily Report, a breakdown of details on your child’s day that you get when you pick them up. There are a ton of variations of this out there, but many of the basics they include are what they ate, how many and the duration of naps, and a diaper report.
Just because I was using my family as childcare doesn’t mean I couldn’t also use a Childcare Daily Report. Any parent can go out and either buy some {Etsy had some really great looking ones} or use the samples out there to build your own and include the things that are important to you.
In the end, I didn’t end up creating a physical Childcare Daily Report. But we all ended up on the same page. When I ask my questions, they know I’m looking for more details. And we all have more months under our belts now to have a better routine and expectations of how this goes. I’m not sure I’ll ever get ENOUGH details to satisfy my mama heart. The next best thing is really being with the baby. So I’ll keep my 20 questions prepped and ready to go.
