10 Things I Miss About Daycare

Ever since I started staying home with my kids, I’ve been trying to convince Even Steven that most stay-at-home moms send their kids to daycare.

So far he’s not believing me, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.

As much as I love staying home with my kids, there are several things that I really miss about daycare!

#1 – Let’s get the obvious over with – professionally trained childcare providers were taking care of my children all day. They taught them things, so I didn’t have to.

#2 – And the next obvious reason – I didn’t have to take care of my kids 24/7. I had adult time five days a week. And – believe it or not – I really liked having entire conversations without someone throwing a tantrum or peeing on the dining room floor.

#3 – Professionals got my kids on a nap schedule for me. All I had to do was not mess it up too terribly on the weekends. I never understood how hard it was to get a kid on a decent nap schedule – until poor Simon came along, and it was all up to me. (That didn’t go so well, by the way.)

#4 – Someone else was responsible for feeding my kids two meals and two snacks five days per week. I didn’t have to worry about fruit and vegetable intake because it was their job to meet the nutritional needs of my kids.

And it meant that I wasn’t in the kitchen feeding kids for the majority of my day.

#5 – My kids didn’t watch television all day long. And I never felt guilty if they watched a show before bed.

Okay – I’ll be honest – I still don’t feel guilty if they watch a show (or several) before bed. But I thought it would make me sound like a better mom if I at least pretended to be concerned. Oh well, I tried…

#6 – Someone else fed my kids their baby food. Oh my gosh – what a pain!! I seriously barely fed Simon baby food at all because I couldn’t stand sitting in front of his high chair trying to shovel food into his mouth for what felt like hours a day. Perhaps this has something to do with his outright refusal of all vegetables right now.

#7 – Five days per week, I got to interact with other kids that were the same age as mine. This was always comforting to me – especially when I saw the other kids acting like terrorists and disobeying their parents.

#8 – The daycare teachers were a great source of information on how to handle certain ages and stages (and to assure me that my kids were normal). Except now I’m fairly certain that they were wrong, but that’s a post for another day.

#9– They basically potty-trained Miles. I can’t believe I had to do it myself with Alice, and I’m going to go with a child-taught method with Simon.

Either Miles and Alice can teach him or he can teach himself. But I refuse to have anything to do with it. See me in 2017 when I write a blog post complaining about Simon wearing diapers to kindergarten.

#10 – Did I mention that I used to have adult conversations?

And now I will share two pictures of my little cuties on their last day of daycare. Aren’t they so cute and sweet? It’s hard to believe that this was more than 2 years ago!