Well, I spoke with my provider again today. It seems my daughter does lay down with the other kids, for as long as she stays in the room. Unfortunately, some days, after an hour of laying down quietly with the other kids, my daughter is still not asleep and then the provider wants to leave the room, to do the dishes. If she leaves my daughter in the room she will wake up the other kids, even though we have both explained to her several times that the other kids want to sleep and it is not fair to them to wake them up because you don't want to sleep. Every day that she doesn't sleep, she gets the lecture, and now she has to skip the park as well if she doesn't sleep.

Now it seems what the daycare lady is doing is taking her out of the room if she is not asleep after an hour, and leaving her in the hallway, with all the doors closed. So today she called to her sister through the door and woke her up, then she went to sleep. I understand the frustration, I would be mad at her too, and I tell her so when I pick her up. The problem is, I am not there, I cannot control the situation, so I all I get is complaints and hearsay when I pick her up. I was under the impression that she was telling the daycare lady no and not laying down on her mat. Actually what she is laying down on her mat with her eyes open and looking at the daycare lady. I will mention the rubbing of the eyes though to keep them closed. I think now she is trying to take the attention away though, since as Golden Rule mentioned, she thinks she is doing this for attention. She lays down on the floor and turns away from my daughter so as to remove the attention.

She does not "hate" my daughter. I think she likes her for the most part, but she prefers babies, and the fact that she always raves about my baby and complains about my toddler, does not make me feel good. I worry that she is going to give my daughter a complex and make her jealous of her sister whom she now loves. I also get the impression that she is looking for any excuse to get rid of her, as she makes it clear that she is doing me a favour by taking her since she doesn't normally take toddlers. She reminds me of this periodically if my daughter misbehaves.

I am frustrated with the Aylmer situation in general, since the daycares are all subsidized, but it is nearly impossible to get a spot, the daycare people are more complacent than in other places. All the people I know in Aylmer have difficulty since there are so few places for a large population. If you find a spot, you keep your mouth shut, hang on as hard as you can and pray you don't get kicked out for something out of your control. Perhaps this is where my passive agression comes from. Every time you pick up your kids, there is always something the daycare lady will complain about. At one place they told me she had diarrhea which is a kickable offence if it happens too often. Oddly enough since she the time she was 6 months old, my daughter has been so constipated she would cry when she had a bowel movement. The diarrhea complaint was a huge surprise. When she began to cry during her bowel movements again, then the daycare lady said it was perfect. When it came time to bring my baby, this woman made it clear that she didn't want babies. She begrudingly agreed to take our baby, after giving us the run around. I was concerned though that the baby would sense that she was not wanted and was looking for something else. Amazingly, I found the current lady who agreed to take both my kids. At the time I thought I was dreaming to find a place for the baby. That was pure luck.

Then this lady would complain my toddler wouldn't eat. So I told her, put the food in front of her, if she doesn't eat, take it away and don't give her cookies at snack time. She still continued to complain that she doesn't eat. I continued to reiterate, that if she doesn't eat it is fine, she just eats more at supper. Then the woman got really angry that her child eats at home but not here. She took it as a personal insult that my kid wouldn't eat her food. I explained that we had to go through an entire process of taking her supper out for breakfast if she didn't eat it for supper. Finally she got the message and now she eats at home. I offered to try that for her if it was a big deal. So she started sending the lunch home if she didn't eat it and my daughter would have to eat it for supper. She ate the meal fine at home. This made her even more angry because she felt that my daughter was being disrespectful to her by not eating at lunch time. Then I told her to make the portion sizes smaller because what she sent home was enough to feed her for the entire week, and if you put too much on her plate she thinks she has to eat the entire plate and gets discourged. This helped somewhat, she eats maybe 3 / 5 days of the week. It still bugs the daycare lady but the napping thing trumped that so she stopped complaining about it. Honestly, I don't understand why it was such a big deal in the first place. She won't starve by skipping lunch, and it wasn't causing her any more work as I was very insistant that she should not make my daughter special food. She just didn't like the idea of her not eating.

As for my job, I like it a lot of the time, hate it some of the time. I don't get to pick my contracts, I work for a consulting company and they tell me where to go. If the situation at work gets tense, I stick it out until the contract is over, because I don't think it is fair to leave the client hanging, or make the consulting company find me another job. There are not a lot of technology jobs, and I know a lot of programmers out of work, or settling for low paying jobs. I myself worked for half what I should be paid for 6 years because I didn't think I could get anything else. Eventually they laid me off while I was on maternity and I had to find something else. I ended up making twice as much money, but the other job was more fun, since I was always busy. My point is, every job has pros and cons, some of the people on here talking about what it is like to run a daycare makes it sound like they hate their job. I don't always like my job either, but I go to work, do the best I can, and I don't complain to my boss constantly unless I want to be fired. The daycare people here know they won't be fired because they are so scarce so if something causes them any effort at all, like having to heavern forbid actually wipe my daughter's bum, they pass it along to the parents and expect them to magically solve the problem.

Honestly, the daycare situtation is so bad here, I even fix the daycare ladies computer for free in the hopes that she will want to keep me around.

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