It was just a few days ago that Emma started going to childcare. It’s been nearly two months since she was born, and the maternity leave is running out. Tuesday — her first day at Future Stars — was a long time coming. Months before Emma was born, Ashley and I set out in search of a childcare facility in Austin. We needed something convenient, quasi-affordable (bottom-of-the-barrel, barely meeting minimum state standards is going to run over $600 a month in the Austin and San Antonio areas) and most importantly, it had to be high quality.
It’s a search that must begin when your child is literally not much larger than a peanut. Some waiting lists are years-long, and of those lists, some are so tightly controlled, as the director of the UT lab school put it, if the university president wanted his child enrolled, he’d have to go to the back of the 300-child wait list. Other lists are a little more pliable. But a few months ago, we were uncertain of where we’d end up — and quite frankly, a bit worried.
It seemed that every place we looked wouldn’t work:
*You’re looking at more than two years to get in here, one place said;
*You’ll probably never get in here;
*It’s $1,300 a month here.
Then my mom found Future Stars. It sounded almost too good to be true: affordable, convenient, NAEYC-accredited. The school’s a little rough around the edges, a little institutional, but overall it seemed like it would work. There’s worse things in the world than not having the latest model of the Bye-Bye Buggy.
So last Tuesday, Ashley headed north on I-35 and stopped at the IRS building. Oh, right — I forgot to mention that… Future Stars is on the Austin IRS campus. More than half of the children enrolled there are from government-employed families. The balance comes from “civilians,” like us.
Since it’s at the IRS, security’s a bitch. There’s a 8-foot-tall, barbed-wire-topped chain link fence that surrounds the compound. At the entrance, armed security guards stand watch, aided by a with metal detector, video cameras, etc. I guess people really do hate the Tax Man.
But I digress.
So visitors to the IRS campus must go through security. That means submitting to a vehicle search by the aforementioned security guards before driving past the gates. Employees and even us civilians who have children at Future Stars get security passes that allow quick entry and exit. But apparently getting those passes isn’t quite so easy. We were told to drop off our enrollment paperwork ahead of time so it would be processed and we’d get our clearance.
But Tuesday came, and no word on our status. So when Ashley arrived on her way to work, it took some 35 minutes to get past the front gate and deliver our precious daughter to her new classroom.
Wednesday, same drill. We were subsequently told by the director that it would be over a week before we could get our clearance. The guards were short-staffed, she said.
When Ashley came home that afternoon, the proverbial poop began hitting the fan. She had a note from the school informing parents of our classroom (with a grand total of eight infants) that there were TWO confirmed cases of RSV, or Respiratory Syncytial Virus.
It’s some nasty stuff. But after consulting with two pediatricians, we decided to send Emma back on Thursday. The docs said that the virus is just about everywhere. If we’d had our druthers, we’d of kept her home.
When Ashley came home on Thursday, she had another note. This one warned parents of a confirmed case of Hand, Foot, & Mouth Disease. And that was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. We can’t send Emma back to that place. Three nasty bugs in two days in one classroom of only eight children isn’t a good sign. The director doesn’t seem to see any urgency in getting our security clearance. If the shoe doesn’t fit…(good gawd, someone please stop the horrendous flow of cliches!!!)
We’ve cobbled together childcare for the week. Ash and I are splitting duties on Monday. Mom’s coming up on Tuesday. Auntie Amanda is flying in from Chi-Town to visit and can’t wait to care for her niece through the rest of the week. But now we’re left scrambling to do something we’d spent months doing during the pregnancy — searching for quality childcare…
