“It just wasn’t something I’d heard much about,” she says.
Ten years before Lisa was sitting in that pedicure chair asking another mom for childcare contacts, I had been anxiously begging my own neighbors in a small North Carolina town for answers to the same question: Who will take care of my child while I’m at work? Fortunately, for both Lisa and me, our neighbors had an answer: The woman down the street takes care of kids in her home.īefore that conversation, Lisa had never considered leaving her baby in a home-based child care. Talking to Lisa, whose son Cole is now seventeen and brother to a younger sister who is 15, I remembered my own child-care dilemma. That’s how she learned about a home-based child care program owned and run by Benu Chhabra right in her own California neighborhood. Then when Cole was about four weeks old, Lisa took a much needed morning off to get a pedicure and found herself sharing her child care quandary with the mom in the next chair. I couldn’t imagine my baby thriving in that setting.” Kids were moving around all the time and constantly working with different teachers. “The nannies just seemed inexperienced, and the center felt too clinical. Neither of those options felt right, she says. They interviewed two nannies and also visited an infant-pre-K center in a local school. Lisa and her husband ramped up their search for the right caregiver. “But I also couldn’t imagine who would give my baby the kind of love and attention I could give him.” “I had to get back in the workforce,” she says now. She didn’t see herself as the stay-at-home mom her own mother had been. She didn’t have parents or in-laws in close proximity. By the time her son Cole was a few weeks old, as her maternity leave waned, she was getting a little bit desperate, and she didn’t have a back-up plan. Like many moms to be, Lisa Kemper, a full-time manager for a mortgage insurance company, started fretting about childcare while she was still pregnant.
0 kommentar(er)
