A Farm House Preschool!

Six more weeks until my due date.  Five more weeks until I can expect my baby to be born via induction.  Four more weeks of work.  And three more weeks until the yogurt in my refrigerator expires.  Time is really flying.

I enrolled Andy in a two year old preschool program yesterday after taking a tour of a local place I found online.  The program runs from late August through May and is two days per week, two and a half hours per day.  That seems like a reasonable amount of time for a normal two year old to be out of the house- although Andy is in day care now over fifty hours per week, so for him, this will barely be a visible blip in the week.  Imaging going from your full time job down to running payroll reports for some company two short mornings a week.  You'd be like, really?  Is this it?  For real?  Well, now what do I do with all this leftover time?  Thank goodness for television.

The preschool was a little weird.  It's in a converted farm house- the preschool program is run on the first floor of the farm house, and the owners live on the second floor.  Although the two areas are completely separate with different entrances, this fact still bothers me.  Does the owner ever come down to the preschool in just his robe?  His robe and a pair of black socks?  While holding a whiskey bottle?  

I automatically assume that anyone who would choose to live above a preschool is probably a robe-wearing alcoholic, but these are the kind of conclusions I immediately draw due to my overly distrusting and paranoid nature.  However, please note that this image of drunken, black-socked, unshaven, whiskey swigging preschool owner didn't actually stop me from signing Andy up in the program.  Other than this little glitch, everything else about the school seemed legit.  Preschool has been around twenty years and has two locations (I wonder what kind of lowlife lives above the OTHER location), and seems to be run properly with an actual director and preschool teachers for each age group and classroom.  The children all seemed happy and engaged in educational activities.  And, did I mention that this is basically the only preschool I could find that accepts two year olds?  Other than the park district, that is, which has a wait list the length of my arm.  I just don't know if I can count on over half a dozen children getting run over or deported in order for Andy to move up on that park district list.  I've kept my fingers crossed, but it was getting to the point where very few toddlers were getting hit by busses, and a decision just had to be made.  Farm house preschool it is!

The farm house preschool is non-denominational Christian.  This was my other hang up when I started looking into the school.  Even though I'm technically Catholic, I am very wary of things, people, places, and animals that advertise themselves as Christian.  I mean, I want Andy to have some sense of religion in his life, but I needed to know exactly how "Christian" this place was.  Learning about Baby Jesus around Christmas, okay.  Coming home with leaflets about the second coming of Christ and the insistent need to be born again otherwise risk eternal burning in the inferno that used to be the Chicago suburbs- not so okay.  Saying grace before a meal?  Sure, why not.  Being shown pictures of aborted fetuses during a pro-life rally in the preschool parking lot?  No, no, no, no.

I asked the director during my tour- how "Christian" is this place?  Those may have been my exact words.  She was quick to reassure me that it's all Christmas and Easter stuff and the occasional thanking God before enjoying on a snack of vanilla wafers and milk.  I considered asking specifically about the inferno and fetus concerns, but then figured if she didn't bring it up, why should I?  It's not like I'm the weirdo here.  I'm not the one working in a farm house preschool- just the one about to send their kid there.

Touring the preschool reminded me of when I was pregnant with Andy and trying to figure out his day care situation.  The burning question initially was: home day care or corporate center?  It didn't take too long to decide on the corporate day care.  After one particularly unpleasant visit to a home day care, our mind was made up.  I want to say that the day care provider's grotesquely burnt and scarred face had nothing to do with our decision to not sign Andy up for that particular home day care, but it certainly didn't help.  Once we were in the home, which smelled of dogs and cigarette smoke, it was only sheer politeness that kept me sticking around to actually speak with the lady.  By the time she got to the part in her sales pitch about how she often had to pick up her son from school due to his irritable bowel syndrome, and that necessitated loading all of the babies into her rickety looking van in order to go pick up bowel boy, I was pretty much done.  Other than that, the lady was very nice- but it was within a week that we were signed up at the corporate day care, the one that did not smell like dogs and cigarettes and the one that did not involve transporting my child in a rusted out '89 Dodge Caravan while squinting through an eyeball encased in purple, puffy third-degree burn tissue matter.  Nearly two years later, I'm confident we made the right decision.

I hope that the farm house preschool turns out to be a good decision, too.  Because even though we are happy with Andy's day care now, I had my reservations up until he had been there a month or two.  I wasn't convinced that it was the BEST day care we could find- I just knew that it was better than the alternative.  That's kind of how I feel about the farm house preschool now.  It's good, it's better than the alternatives I've found, but my decision making is always peppered with reservations.  I'm still not convinced that I made the best choice earlier today in ordering the chicken quesadilla at lunch- but by tomorrow, I think I'll have decided it was the best dining choice I could have made at the time.  And it was delicious.

As long as I never see the owner of the day care downstairs in a bath robe, I'm sure I will grow to love the quaint little farm house preschool, too.  And Andy will be head over heels for the place once he sees the gigantic play area out back, complete with numerous little red toddler cars for him to "drive."  I probably should have checked the toddler car bumpers for Jesus fish stickers- but, at the end of the day, Andy will only be there five hours a week anyway.  So who gives a crap.