Tuesday, October 1st, 2013

Well Elizabeth and I have had enough stress lately with our "daycare provider".  Pay attention to the quotation marks there. 

So for some background information, we had signed up to have a lady that runs an in-home daycare which is really close by where we live (like less than 2 blocks) take care of Nolan.  We had signed up for this about 8 months ago.  I guess in retrospect we signed up for daycare at this place mostly because of its convenient location.  We should have done a little more background checking...

Fast forward to yesterday.  Elizabeth checks the mail and it turns out we got a letter form our daycare provider WHO WAS SCHEDULED TO START WITH NOLAN IN ONE WEEK.  It turns out that she is cancelling our daycare because she "had help quit and will not have as many children".  She goes on to say that she cannot pay to add another employee because it would be too much stress on her family.  This letter appeared to be a form letter, it had multiple grammatical errors, and it seemed to contradict conversations that she had with Elizabeth only last week.

Wow.  Where to start with this. I should probably note that she had contacted us before Nolan was born to try and have us sell Yankee Candles for her as a fundraiser.  We did not participate in this because 1) it's kind of weird for in-home daycare to make parents do fundraisers, and 2) we don't want to peddle candles to all of our friends and family.  According to her facebook page, she has an upcoming fundraiser of selling pasta as well. 

Elizabeth had been in contact with her throughout last week trying to iron out a few details.  I should probably mention that her name is Terri Bogenrief.  So in messaging back and forth with her she mentioned that she was recently upgraded to a QRS rating of 3 and would be charging us a little more.  Whatever.  So at that time it seemed like she was still planning on working for us, and she was even "upgrading".  Apparently she is taking less children instead.  

The worst part of it is the very small amount of time that she gives us to find a replacement.  The letter she mailed was sent last Friday, and we didn't receive it until Monday.  Those are a few extra days that would have been nice to search for a replacement!  She could have called, or texted, or emailed.  Nope.  Now before when we had lined up our service with her she made it clear to us that if we would have for some reason wanted to cancel our daycare and go with another place that we were to call her right away or contact her immediately.  Apparently she does not offer the same courtesy. 

I honestly don't even think that she had any help quit like she claims.  My theory is that for some reason she just wanted to back out of caring for Nolan (probably because we weren't exactly wanting to do her stupid fundraisers), so she sends us this form letter in the mail and says that is that.  She proceeded to un-friend us on Facebook immediately so that we could not contact her or write our story on her wall.  Elizabeth has tried to text her but has received no response.

I have a hard time getting over how unprofessional this lady has been, and how ridiculous it is to cancel a daycare service with a week to go.  Especially when doing so via letter when she could have done so quicker in so many other ways (walk over since she lives two blocks away, call, text, email, carrier pigeon).  

Overall, I do feel a little relief in knowing that she will not be taking care of Nolan.  Especially now that we have happened to look her up on Iowa Courts Online.  It's hard for me to tell what most of the filings are for, but she is involved in close to 40 cases (almost all of them as a defendant).  It seems that we've dogged a bullet in that we will not have to deal with her in the future, and that she will be nowhere near our son.