Baby Parking

This week I have to find a place to put the baby while Daddy goes back to work after a crisis-induced hiatus. If you want to put your kids in daycare, there a few choices. The cheapest and best-regarded is the public route. These are the daycare centers that are run by the city. To get into one you need to apply for a place in January. You rank them one to five and there is a week where you can go and visit them, check out the distance, cleanliness (something I don't worry much about, but others around here seem to find importantissimo), activities, etc. and make your choice. Hubby visited them (all about the same) and we ranked according to distance. One of them is less than a five-minute walk from my house, for example. Ever since I ranked that one as number one, I have passed several times with the dog and happened to see lunch ladies in hair nets, teachers (or "educators" as they call them here) and various staff members outside sneaking smokes (better than in the bathroom I suppose, unlike the HOSPITAL, which is REEK-A-LICIOUS in the WC!). They don't appear to be doing it at the same time, which I guess is the important thing. Those little taters need supervision, after all.

The public daycare centers provide free lunch, free diapers (most are not particularly interested in dealing with washables, which would mean putting the dirty one in a plastic bag that you provide and then snapping on another one that you provide, but whatever) and the price is based on how much you make.

You get word in May if you get in to a public daycare center for the next fall (September or October). If you don't, then you can either leave them with the baby's grandparents (lots of people do this here and grandparents often feel it is their "right" to have your kids full-time while you're at work) or leave them at any number of private daycare centers (cost about twice as much as public ones, don't provide lunch or diapers).

If you only need a few hours here or there for coverage, there are also "Baby Parking" centers. Yep, they say it in English, as in "Porto il mio figlio oggi in Baby Parking." These are what we are checking on for this week. They cost something like 7 euros an hour and you can drop off and pick up when you want.

I will let you know how my research goes.