My son started daycare fulltime on Monday, and it turns out his regular caregiver has Mondays off. I met the lady who will be her backup (let's say Maria) and since then I've been feeling very anxious.
She would barely talk or communicate. She didn't ask me anything about his feeding/changing .. and another caregiver took all the information from me.
She wouldn't smile or respond with eye contact, which I chalked up to the fact that it was early morning and first day back to work after a vacation or whatever.

I went to check up on my son in the afternoon and it was like pulling teeth to get any information out of her about how my son was since morning. I got monosyllable answers and she just looked perpetually pissed off.

I left the infant room for about 5 minutes and I could hear my son start to cry as soon as I left the room. He was crying pretty much the whole time I was out of the room (I know 'coz I was just outside talking to someone) and when I went back in, he was still sitting in the same place, going red in the face crying and Maria was still sitting with the other two kids playing peekaboo. Needless to say, I was very upset.

I am not even ruling out racism here. I am Indian, and there is another Indian DCP in the center who told me that Maria doesn't talk to her or respond to her when spoken to either, but talks to everyone else just fine.

I asked the center manager to either move my son to another room which has a very nice teacher that we already know (my son had spent a couple of days in that room last year when we needed emergency backup care). I was told there was no vacancy there and that the center director would talk to me about it. They also promised to talk to Maria.

The center director has not contacted me even though it's been 3 days.

I like everything else about this daycare. It's close to work, all the other teachers are fabulous. It's just this one lady, one day a week. I have a nagging feeling of uneasiness about her. Should I wait for a couple of Mondays more to see if she warms up or should I insist that they make alternate arrangements on Mondays? I don't want to pull him out of this daycare 'coz as I said, everything else about it is great.

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