Finding Ellora a placement in daycare was a bit of a fiasco. We spent hours upon hours over two days making phone calls, to a minimun of 50 daycare centres with no luck! The problem is twofold. First, most daycares don't accept kids under two years old! How is that possible? It seems like the majority of families rely on the grandparents to do babysitting for them, or the mother is a long-term stay at home mom. Not really an option in our case! Second is that Korean babies receive goverment assistance to subsidize daycare, so many house-mothers will use that money, which completely covers the fee, to send their kids to daycare for a few hours a few times a week, taking the opening away for someone who needs full-time care.
We had two opportunities present themselves to us. First, we found a daycare that told us they had a spot for Ellora, but it was a bit far from our home. Being that we were desparate (referring to the babysitter, who we loved, quitting suddenly) we didn't have much of a choice, so I went to check it out. I wasn't really too happy with the place since it was older and seemed a bit run down. The toys were boring and even someo of them broken, and I found out that they never let the kids play outside. I guess what turns out to be lucky for us, the manager called us back later that day to say there wasn't a spot for Ellora afterall, since it had been filled that morning by another child, and the rest of the staff weren't informed. I have to say I was kind of relieved, although also annoyed that we wasted time looking for another place.
The second option happened to be a place really close to Joe's school, in a very new and clean building. Joe and I went on our own to check it out (that means without a co-teacher to translate for us), and right away we were very please with it, so I enrolled her on the spot!
The place is called 튼튼아이어린이집 = Teun Teun Ah Ie Oe Rin Ie Jib= Healthly Baby Baby House/Daycare. It is located in an apartment unit, so it had three bedrooms, one for each of the various age groups, a large livingroom play space, kitchen for meal preparation and a washroom. There are three or four "teachers" who are each responsible for a maximum of three babies, of different age groups. Ellora's "class" has two other babies in it, one also about 9 months old, and the other just over a year. Every week they have a schedule of events, such as visits to local sites like the airplane museum. I'm not sure if Ellora goes out to all of those or if that's just the older toddlers, but she does get to go out for walks in the stroller every so often. The teachers will take out two kids at a time.
Ellora's backpack and daily log book to keep track of her health and activities. They take her temperature at least once a day and record all her sleep and feeding times.
Getting ready for school in the morning.
The big living room play area.
The TV (we've never seen it on though) and play kitchen.
Ellora's classroom with some of the other kids and her teacher.
Playing with some toys.
Classmates.
Another classroom for older kids.
The entrance way. The big sign says something like "Nice to meet you" or "Welcome".
The door to the daycare.
The apartment building where the daycare is located, on the first floor, bottom left corner.
Getting on well with the other little girl in her class it seems.
And here she is on her very first field trip, to the airplane museum.
No comments:
Post a Comment