Dare I say that I'm getting back into the blogging world?

Well, I've got some extra time on my hands now so I thought I'd get back into the world of blogging! I can't believe it's been over a year since the last post that I wrote. So much has happened since then!

The biggest news is that my daycare is officially CLOSED and I'm opening a home preschool as soon as DCFS gets their rear in gear. It's been quite an emotional process! I ran my daycare for almost four years and it's never been exactly what I've hoped it to be. I loved, loved, loved teaching the kids different things and doing crafts and such with them, but when you have a mixed age group it becomes darn near impossible to spend that learning time with the older ones. I considered running a daycare that had only preschool age kiddo's, but the problem with that is that most of the time those families have younger siblings too and don't want to send their children to two different daycares. Then I became friends with Joy Anderson who runs a preschool out of her home in Idaho and that's when I got the idea of opening my own home preschool! It was one of those moments where I was like "Duh - why didn't I think of this sooner?" The positives outweighed the negatives BIG TIME! 1 - My days would be DONE by 3:00. 2 - I would be doing what I love to do which is teach little ones the basics, do crafts and have nothing but fun while doing it. 3 - I'd be making good money. 4 - Maddie's at the perfect preschool age to be a part of it every day. And the list goes on!  As soon as I knew that I wanted to do this (and after Travis said he'd support me in it), I decided on the name "Country Charm Preschool", saw my laywer to become an LLC and created my website. I would include the link to my website, but DCFS made me password protect it b/c it was considered advertising and apparently I can't do that while my licensing is still in the works. More to come on that....

I purposely didn't tell many people about my plans b/c I did not want my daycare families to find out about it from word-of-mouth. I wanted them to hear it from me first. I used my week out at Eldora to write up the email that I would be sending out to all of them. I decided on doing it over email b/c that was the best way for me to tell them all at the same time. I figured it would be too difficult to try to "catch" all of my parents at pick-up time and then deal with parents coming in during the middle of a conversation and such. I sent out the email at the beginning of October which gave them all three whole months to find new daycare. I knew that I was risking my own income by giving them all so much time, but I wanted to be fair to them b/c I knew this would be a big and unexpected change for them. In my contract, when families leave I only require a two week notice so I felt I was going above and beyond by giving them so much time. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined the back-lash that I received by a number of my families. Travis has received a number of phone calls from me very upset after reading awful emails that some families sent me! I had some families leave out of anger and not pay what they owe, I had some parents stop talking to me all together and like I said - I received some awful emails from people criticizing me very harshly. I won't go into any details on here on the things that were said to me. I'll just say that I've never been so hurt and upset. The worst is probably the fact that I lost a good friend over all of this due to a MAJOR misunderstanding that could have very, very easily been fixed. It just boggles my mind that I did so much for these families and cared/loved their children and instead of appreciating all that I've done, they've become downright mean b/c I'm temporarily inconveniencing them and making them find new daycare. It really put a sour taste in my mouth for people, in general. The lack of appreciation is very hurtful. Travis thinks I should have our lawyer send letters out to the families that still owe me, but I just want to move past it all. It's simply not worth it to me - getting the money won't make my hurt feelings go away. To top it off, as soon as I started advertising around town and had almost one full class filled, someone turned me in to DCFS! So the DCFS "witch" called, chewed me out and made me stop advertising immediately. She also informed me that they were months behind on licensing and I shouldn't hold my breath on opening January 3rd like I hoped. Yippee.  With all that being said though - it really warmed my heart to receive the small gifts of appreciation from the families that did stay with me until the end. It also meant a lot to me to see the tears and the sadness on each of those family's last day - that told me that what I did meant a lot to them!

So now it's basically a waiting game and I am NOT good at waiting on others! Our checkbook is sure taking a hit right now too which is just added stress, but we're doing what we can to make things work in the meantime. Nobody ever said that change was easy! But I just know it'll be worth it in the long run. Even though I'm not advertising, I'm still receiving random phone calls from people wanting to be put on my waiting list - if that doesn't motivate me to keep going, I don't know what will! Until things do get moving though, I've been enjoying my free days and using the time to set up the preschool room (pics to come soon) and finishing up my daily curriculum. The kids are going to have SO much fun - lots of hands-on learning, lots of books/reading, science work, math work, etc. I'm sure the first year will be a learning curve for me as well. As soon as I get the go-ahead from DCFS, I will post a link to my website for everyone to see. I'm pretty proud of what I'm doing and what's ahead for us! They say success is the best revenge and I'm determined to be successful and prove to all those that were so negative to me that I am doing a good thing!

Till next time....