Kieran is doing great in his daycare. Or rather, his Early Learning Center. (I say with tongue not quite firmly planted in cheek.)
We didn’t end up putting Kieran in the daycare around the corner from the house. It ended up being quite A THING to find a daycare that we liked that would accept Kieran’s cloth diapers. Over the course of 24 hours, I got well-versed in Section 3.4.3 of the Environmental Health Code for Southern Nevada – which pertains to cloth diapers in a daycare setting. The initial response I got from all but one of the daycares I called was “Oh no, the Health Department doesn’t allow cloth diapers!” which required my educating them that there was not, in fact any regulation of that sort on the books. That flustered them all, to say the least. When pressed, they all said they would have to get back to me regarding whether they would accept Kieran’s cloth diapers or not. (We realized quickly that we might have to put him in disposables during the day because of this, but we wanted to explore all the options available before making that expensive and environmentally-unfriendly choice.)
On Paul’s 2nd day at work (Tuesday the 28th) Kieran and I toured 5 daycares. Four were pretty good, and one was a “Hell NO”. All were within 3 miles of our house. The final one I toured touted itself as an “Early Learning Center” as opposed to a Daycare. It’s actually a preschool that starts taking kids at three months. I had forgotten what the tuition was while touring it and rapidly began thinking that we wouldn’t be able to afford somewhere with this kind of program, with individual curriculum for each child, even in the infants room! I was impressed that after a little conversation about what we expected in the handling of cloth diapers (just toss the whole dirty thing in the waterproof, zippered bag we’d provide – no rinsing or special handling at all) the director agreed that they could accept Kieran and his fluffy butt the next week.
Paul and I discussed all the facilities that evening and made our decision to go with Hand in Hand Preschool. The tuition ($200 a week) was right in line with the other centers I’d toured, and it was just over a block away from the house. Paul accompanied Kieran and me on Thursday to see the place for himself and sign the papers to register our little boy.
