Daycare

One of the things we hoped to do was to get Hopscotch enrolled in a new daycare as soon as possible so that she could have a schedule and some predictability, as well as make some new friends.   One of the limiting factors though is that we don’t want to have to have her change schools, so we needed to wait until we had some idea of where we were going to live.

We were able to narrow down the area we wanted to live to the the northern suburbs in part through recommendations from Kelly’s workmates.  Once we knew we’d be looking to settle in a certain area we started looking for schools.  In Colorado Hop had been in a Montessori preschool and we had really come to love it.  Neither Kelly or I were Montessori junkies or even very familiar with it before she started, but Hop was doing really well there, so we decided to look for Montessori schools in Wellington as well.

In the northern burbs there are three Montessoris.  After contacting them it turned out that there was only availability in one, so we went in for a visit.  It was very diverse, with a lot of Chinese and Indian children, but otherwise very similar to her school back in Colorado.  In fact, there was only one big difference, and that was the hours.  It was only open from 8:30-3:30, but offered no before or after school care.  For now that could work, but once I find a job and start work it would pose a problem, so even though we liked it, we reluctantly decided it wasn’t going to work.

Kelly’s supervisor has two kids that are close to Hopscotch’s age and recommended the daycare that her kids go to.  It’s next to a farm and focuses a lot of having the kids play outside and just be kids.  When we went for a visit we saw that it was quite different from Hop’s previous school.  A lot more unstructured, with kids running around everywhere, but it did also have some structured play and teacher led activities.  It would be a different environment than her previous school, but we figured that could be good too, so signed her up!  We just completed her acclimatization week and so far it has gone really well so we’re excited for Hop to settle in and start making some friends.

One last daycare note: New Zealand provides a subsidy for the first 20 hours of early childhood education for every 3, 4 and 5 year old in the country.  It doesn’t make it cost half of what it did in the U.S. (partly because Hop was actually at daycare for more than 8 hours a day), but it does make it cost quite a bit less than it did back in Colorado, which is nice.