My second daycare job

I will write more later about my first job in high school, which was as a teacher’s assistant for four year olds. After I set the career goal to work with kids, help kids, and be a child advocate, I went to work in another daycare in the infant room. 

This was before internet job searching was popular. I literally walked into this place, asked for an application, filled it out there, and was hired on the spot. These days they say getting hired on the spot is a red flag, but I didn’t know that at the time! I had a very low self esteem due to a lot of verbal and emotional abuse from my parents and aunts. I didn’t think anyone would hire me at all. 

The state ratio for infants under 1 year old was 5:1 and 11:2. That is, five infants for one caregiver and if there’s two caregivers then you can have 11 infants. This infant room had 11 infants and one worker, which was why I was hired on the spot. The boss was walking in and out of the room helping her, but if the state walked in on that situation they would have been in deep trouble. 

I look back on that now and I think, what on earth were we doing? We were two young girls who didn’t have kids yet, making federal minimum wage, and caring for literally 11 babies. How did we do that? It’s hard to remember. I do remember we had a system where one of us would be responsible for input (feeding), and the other of us output (diaper changes). I used to sit on a mat crisscross applesauce and have two infants, one cradled in each knee, giving them their bottles. There was a rocking chair, but I hardly ever used it because I could only manage one infant in it. My boss considered it a waste of time to only be feeding one baby at a time. 

All of these babies are 24-25 years old now. Some of them probably have babies. I did look up some of their names on Facebook and found two of them. I knew it was them because they have uncommon names and the same faces they had as babies. They both do well. One was interning for the health department during the pandemic and the other is an addiction counselor. (Disclaimer-I definitely didn’t friend them. They would have never remembered me. I only glanced their profiles.)

We must have been doing something right. I worked there for over a year and then started working as a caregiver at an emergency shelter for children. 

#daycare #daycareworker #childcare #infantroom #infantdaycare

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