Decluttered

 I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions – but this year I did. 

It’s no secret that I like to plan big projects for any periods of downtime – like my summer ‘vacation’ days. I don’t like to travel, and I say I don’t like relaxing, but I’m not certain that is truly accurate. Things that involve being pampered or catered to are not things that I enjoy – in fact, they are more likely to make me feel uncomfortable and stressed. Likewise, sitting still for any length of time is difficult for me and requires an immense amount of mental effort.

I feel ‘relaxed’ – maybe centered, invigorated or rejuvenated are better descriptions – by doing things like going to the gym, hiking, doing yardwork, cleaning or working on projects around the house like painting or installing new flooring etc. Things that keep me moving but don’t require me to carry on conversations with other people – these things are ‘relaxing’ – they allow my mind to wander and dream without interruption.

My summer vacation to-do list starts forming late fall/early winter and continues to grow until June. Every year the summer project list also includes some indoor ‘organizing’ items in case there are any bad weather days on my vacation.  These tasks are always at the bottom of the list and usually get put off – mostly because I’d rather do the outdoor tasks regardless of the weather – but also because they tend to be more stationary ‘activities’.

This is where this post truly begins. Putting off these organizing tasks – especially the ones that involve paperwork and filing – over and over again had become an issue. My filing cabinet became too full to add any more papers to the folders so loose papers were just laying on top of the folders and were prone to falling off if the cabinet drawer was opened.

Due to having no available space in the filing cabinet there were multiple piles of ‘to-be-filed’ papers collecting on my desk. It was becoming almost impossible to find any workspace or even a flat spot to put my computer keyboard, mouse, or coffee cup. This, along with my already established distain for sitting still, definitely contributed to my delaying other paperwork type tasks. Related side story…

Montgomery had gone for his annual vet visit in October 2022 and received his rabies vaccination. I put the receipt and vaccination certificate, with new tag still attached, on my desk – I planned to file them after I put the new tag on Montgomery’s collar. Fast forward seven months to May 2023 – childcare relicensing visit. My coordinator asked for the required proof of pet vaccination and I KNOW it is on my desk but cannot find it! *sigh* Had to contact the vet, get another copy, complete an inspection agreement form and submit it to my coordinator to prove he was fully vaccinated.

I think that, though I add organizing activities as small tasks for bad weather days, I know that they are really immense tasks. They may start as ‘Sort through the miscellaneous items in the drawer/box/bin’, but they snowball because sorting and organizing papers and small items requires, removing things from where they are stored and making piles of loose things.

Putting away those loose things requires getting out the storage container where the items belong – containers which should be sorted through before anything new gets added…making more piles of loose things. It takes a lot of time to do properly and it always gets much worse before it gets better. It is overwhelming.

I tend to use the childcare space for organizing things. It is the largest open space and it is unused when the daycare is closed. I can spread stuff out to sort and leave it there while I take a break or cook supper etc. and it isn’t going to bother my family. However, when I run out of time (which I most certainly will do), I frantically stuff unsorted items back into containers so I can clean the rooms before the children return.

I’ve now created even more containers of miscellaneous items that need to be sorted…

So this year I tried something different. The winter break consists of three paid holidays and two weekends but there are also three work days. Depending how the holidays land, the three work days could be centered between two long weekends or broken up into single days between holidays and weekends. 

Many of my families have extra time off during this period and do not all require childcare. Typically I have kept the daycare open for those three work days. I do some year end paperwork on the extra days off but don’t plan any big projects due to the variable combination of work days and off days. 

This year I closed for those three days resulting in a whopping ten day winter holiday! I reorganized some toy storage, cleaned out the filing cabinet, and cleared off my desk. Did I get everything done? No, of course not, my to-do list never ends – but I feel so much better. I found Montgomery’s original vaccination certificate and rabies tag. I created only one extra box of ‘to be shredded’ papers but no boxes of miscellaneous stuff.

So that New Year’s Resolution…I’m going to modify my policies to officially close those three work days between Christmas and New Year’s day every year. My summer vacation will still have an exciting list of fun projects – but no paperwork. My new annual winter holiday will now be dedicated to sorting and organizing because this is how the new year should start…

I've Been Thinking...

 

If I had to choose the one thing that bothered me the most about being a funded, licensed family childcare provider it would be the difference in daily childcare fees for infants vs preschoolers. As a trained ECE II those rates, set by the province, are $30/day for infants (under two years old) and $20.80/day for preschool children (aged 2-5 including those in Kindergarten).

These rates are the same for me as they are in funded centres and I understand the reasoning for the different rates in centres due to the different staff to child ratios for infant rooms (1 to 4) and preschool rooms (1 to 8). However, in family childcare I can have a maximum of five children under six years old of which no more than three can be under two years old.

That means I could have three infants and two preschoolers, or five preschoolers and no infants, or any of the combinations in between. It also means my income from daily fees could be as much as $131.60 per day or as little as $104 per day. That min/max difference in daily fees results in a difference of nearly $600/month without any difference in the number of children I enroll or the hours/amount of work I do. I wrote about this 10 years ago – it is not a new problem – but it is still a problem,

If your employer asked you if you would prefer to be paid $2100 or $2700 for the same number of hours work, what would you say? Silly question. Yet, in order for me to keep my income at its maximum, I could not keep all the infants I enroll. If both of my preschoolers are two years old, they may stay in my preschool spaces for up to four years meaning, in that period, my infants would have no preschool spaces to move into if I was to keep only infants in my infant spaces.

Now, multiply my three infant spaces by the four years it could take for my preschoolers to vacate their spaces and that means I may have to dismiss twelve families for no reason other than that their child had a birthday. Those families that may have waited nearly two years from conception until I had a space for their one year old, would now need to start their childcare search again. Some providers even state in their policies that childcare may be terminated when an infant turns two if a preschool space is not available.

I don’t do that – I choose to provide continuity of care because it benefits the child but that decision means I take a pay cut in order to provide what is considered a ‘best practice’. Luckily, not all the infants I enroll stay until they start school but I have gone as long as three years with the same group of children – all over the age of two – at a significant loss of income but some truly amazing long term relationships for all of us.

Still, I question why it has to be this way – especially now that parents pay $10/per day for either infants or preschoolers in any funded childcare facility – centre or home, trained or untrained – flat rate for parents. I used to get confused looks from parents when I told them they owed me less for childcare when their child turned two. Now they don’t even realize I took a pay cut in order to continue providing childcare for them – notably when my expenses for said care are increasing along with the child’s age.

Yes, the Province has been providing a parent fee top-up grant to funded facilities to offset the reduced rate for parents but to date this has been yet another administrative nightmare. I don’t want to rant about that right now but it has made me think that this is actually the perfect way to rectify the inconsistent income for family childcare providers.

If, in family childcare, the top-up grant for both infants and preschoolers was the same amount along with the consistent $10/day rate for parents then it would make budgeting so much easier. Having the same income for all children under six years would eliminate the income fluctuation and provide more stability for providers – a factor which may aid in the retention of family childcare providers.

The $10/day parent fee eliminates the difference between infant and preschool rates for parents. The operating grant rates are different for centres vs homes apparently due to variances in operating expenses. I believe a different rate for the FCC parent fee top-up grant could be possible too since, unlike centres, FCC staff to child ratio is not dependent on our enrollment of infants vs preschoolers.

Alternatively, our parent fee top-up grant could simply be based on the number of infants/preschoolers we are licensed for regardless of the age of the children we currently have enrolled in those spaces (providing they were not vacant spaces). That way our daily fee rate does not have to be different than centre rates but our income would also not fluctuate when our work load does not.

The Early Learning and Childcare Best Practices Manual for Family Childcare acknowledges that it is a benefit for the child to stay in the same setting with the same provider. Why then, do they set rates that discourage, even punish us, for choosing to build these relationships?

Summer 2023

 Wow! So much to write, so little time. Sad that I haven’t been writing any posts about our activities or any of our new ‘stuff’. Yes, the grant funding we’ve received through the Federal funding for childcare has been wonderful but also very time consuming. Spending money is easy but trying to balance ‘wants’ vs ‘needs’ and make the best decisions so I won’t be faced with ‘I wish we had bought that instead’ after all the money is spent – that is hard.

In the Spring when the grant funding was first announced I was already in the midst of making my summer ‘vacation’ plans for revamping the outdoor play space so those plans got a little more upscaled. I knew we had to remove the old rotted wooden pergola but we used that pergola to attach the sun shades for the summer. My south facing outdoor play space can be unbearable without shade – so my first purchase was two retractable awnings.

The old sunshades provided wonderful shade over most of the back yard but it took a whole weekend to get them up using clamps and ropes attached to the house, carport, and pergola. Once they were up, we had no view of the sky until fall when we took them down. On many cloudy or cool days we would have preferred to not have the sunshades but it was far too difficult to take them down temporarily.

This is a view of the yard after all the work we did on my ‘vacation’. You can see the framework for the new awnings but the awnings are not in use as this pic was taken in the early morning when there was little sun. I still struggle with deciding if I should say the awnings are ‘open’ when they are folded and we can see the sky and closed when they are unfolded and covering the yard or vice versa. Either way, all summer we loved to have the option of having sun or shade depending on the weather when we were playing in the yard.

I also purchased more turf tiles – we used to only have a small ‘grass’ area inside the old pergola but now it is twice the size and more open without the pergola dividing the space. We also have a new ground level deck area along the fence side that we use for the easels and other art activities (the deck tiles are easy to clean and have no spaces big enough to lose crayons and paint brushes etc.

The turf tiles are thick rubber and placed on the mulch – both help cushion minor falls which is nice for the climbing structures and the new Ninja Slackline pictured below (also notice the awning is providing shade in this pic).

This summer we finally installed the large laundry sink (on the to do list last year). It is not a new sink, just a new location, and we have always had access to both hot and cold water here but now it is much more convenient to use.

Moving along to the other side of the yard, we have a new, slightly sloped bridge across the ‘river’ in the water area and two new blue tunnels. The children like to pretend they are swimming under water when they crawl through these tunnels – I want to paint some fish inside the tunnels but haven’t done that yet.

The bilge pump and water supply has a new location now too though I actually have plans to modify this area more before next summer so this is only temporary. The water from the pump flows under the bridge and down the ‘river’. The sprinkler hangs from the awning frame above the water area so we can make it ‘rain’ when we want the water area really wet (there are holes in the tarps so water does not pool).

At the far end of the bridge is the gravel digging area – we needed the bridge higher here because the gravel area is more than a foot higher than the ground at this point. Plus, having a sloped bridge is extra fun  I chose to move all the gravel into the little covered ‘house’ we built last summer. The ‘house’ is in the corner of the yard which helps to keep the gravel contained in the area where it belongs and the roof above provides shade at all times of the day – particularly nice because some children like to sit and dig in the gravel for hours every day and I don’t want them to bake in the sun.

The picture below is the view from inside the gravel area.

I moved the talking tube (central vac pipe) from the building area where it used to be. Now it runs along the fence from the gravel area to the water area. I also added some elbows to the pipe so the children don’t look straight through the pipe when they are talking. Not that I minded them using it like a telescope, but some of them couldn’t grasp the concept of ‘talking’ into the tube when they could see through it and would get very frustrated that it didn’t work.

In the space where the gravel used to be is our new ‘music’ area. It is still not complete. In this picture there is nothing ‘new’, we have had the chimes, drums, and other noisy things for many years but now they are all together in a defined space. There are more turf tiles and our old stumps here for seating options. There are multiple different surfaces and items that can be used for experimenting with sound. Since this photo was taken I have purchased some Boomwackers and am collecting some additional ‘music’ making items to add in the future. (Donations are welcome if you have anything that may be useful here).

View of the entrance to the music area – the Virginia Creeper has grown a lot and now covers most of the back and left side of the area – naturally containing the sounds in an acoustic chamber.

The building/construction area of the yard has not been moved or rearranged but I did purchase a large resin storage shed to store the massive amount of loose parts we have accumulated. We have far too much to have all of it out at once and our little toy shed only holds small bins and could not possibly contain all our building supplies.

A tiny peek inside the shed – this is less than a quarter of what is being stored here. Kept out of the elements but still handy when we want additional options beyond what is available in the loose parts bins.

Cushions

 In my ‘Snowball Effect‘ post I covered a bit of history about the four old lounger cushions and mentioned that I wanted to use them for an infant/toddler activity. That ‘plan’ didn’t turn out the way I envisioned – partly because I don’t like sewing – but it has had an interesting outcome.

In the Spring/Summer/Fall we spend most of our playtime outside where there are plenty of opportunities for gross motor activities. In the winter, we still go out daily but for much less time than in the warmer seasons. Although I’m sure getting on all the winter gear counts a physical activity, I still feel the children need more active play choices for the extra time we spend indoors.

In my Indoor Exercise post and the post about the balance pods I wrote about some of the indoor physical activities which the preschoolers and school-age children enjoy. However, my current group is very young and those activities are not particularly age appropriate or easy to adapt for them.

My initial plan was to use the old lounger cushions for an indoor gross motor play activity for the littlest ones in the group. The cushions are about two feet wide, six feet long and six inches thick though they have some buttons and quilting and have become lumpy and uneven over the many years we have used them.

I wanted to fold and roll the cushions into barrel, wedge, and rectangle shapes to use for soft climbers for the infants and toddlers. I hoped to sew covers to hold the cushions in the desired shapes – turns out I haven’t got the required time, patience or skill for sewing covers like that. I might have been more successful if I had wrapped them with duct tape instead – that is still and option.

I also found that when folded into squares or rolled into short barrels the cushions were nearly as tall as the counters and shelves in the playroom – not a safe climbing height. Folded in half as a 2′ x 3′ rectangle the height was ok but they used all the available floor space and would have turned the entire room into a bouncy house – could be fun, but not my goal.

My ‘I am frustrated/out of time/done with this’ solution was to simply stack two of the cushions on top of each other, roll into a long barrel, and stuff into a body pillow type pillowcase I made out of an old sheet. The result is two long, heavy, lumpy blobs that lay like speed humps across the playroom. My husband refers to them as ‘The Manatee’.

The problem now was that these, double sized, heavy log cushions were extremely difficult for me to hoist onto the shelf in the nap room where they were originally stored. This whole ‘renovate the playroom/move the trees’ adventure started because I needed to make it easier to get the cushions on/off the storage shelves when I wanted to use them.

At this point I was beginning to feel like this whole project was a fail. Then I realized that leaving these cushions out all the time might solve two problems. First, I wouldn’t have to face the hassle of dragging them in and out of storage. Second, they could help with the problem of defining the various play zones. This is the view of the floor space in the play room.

The block area is at the bottom right corner of this picture. The music & movement area along the left side and the housekeeping/store/dramatic play area is the top right corner and extends to include the left side of the counter and the table.

I used to use interlocking foam tiles on the playroom floor – available in various colours, I used a different colour mat for each of the different play zones. Those foam mats were easily damaged and Montgomery liked to eat them. So in 2021 I replaced them with rubber mats made from recycled tires – I love the durability, but they are all black so we only have imaginary lines to define spaces.

I’ve been experimenting with chalk and paint on some of the rubber tile scraps. I thought chalk would be nice for a temporary purpose/activity but it has proved difficult to wash completely off the mats. Paint seems to be a better option but would be permanent and, well…I like to be able to change things so I’ve been hesitant to paint the mats. But…what if I used cushion logs to define spaces…

I like to define the spaces because loose blocks from the block area or miscellaneous small toys from the housekeeping area are safety hazards when they are on the floor in the music & movement area. The cushions still offer the babies a soft climber opportunity but they also separate the ‘active’ area from the toy areas. Added bonus – they can be used for seating and even impromptu naps.

Using the cushion logs as dividers allows me to adjust the size of each of the play areas. There isn’t much space in the music & movement area in the picture above – certainly not enough space for the tunnels or the tumbling mats when the rope ladder or monkey bars are in use on the stall bars. The cushions can easily be moved out of the way for that though.

Moving both the log cushions into the block area doesn’t leave much space for building – it would annoy the school-age children. However, the infants and toddlers love this – and it encourages them to sit down in the block area too! Also great for story time.

I may have been a little disappointed that the soft climber didn’t turn out the way I originally planned but I am actually much happier with the versatility of the log cushions (or manatee).

Moving Trees

 In my previous post I wrote about how my plan to repurpose the old lounger cushions resulted in playroom renovation in order to move the ‘nature area trees’. I have been working on a post about the cushions and just realized that I never made a post about the trees after I finally got them moved. So now I’ve got a quick tree post to write – well, mostly just tree pictures to post.

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Here is the renovated playroom with the trees – one on the far right by the entrance to the nap area and one in the centre of the play room.

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Facing North towards the entrance to the nap area the trees are both in the centre of the picture.

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Standing in the nap area, facing South toward the dining/craft room – one tree trunk out of frame to my left.

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Standing in the block area looking toward the playroom entrance – shows the arch the trees form in the high part of the room.

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Standing in the music/movement area looking up at the tree ‘canopy’ filling the space in front of the loft. The children like to look for/count all the birds, squirrel and butterflies hidden in amongst the branches.

Now that I’ve shown you the trees, I can finish the post about the cushions.

The Snowball Effect

 First, a bit of history…

I have four large outdoor lounger cushions. I bought them many years ago at an end-of-season clearance sale – the discounted price meant I got all four of them for less than the cost of just one toddler cot so I couldn’t resist. I briefly used them for napping children – they are thicker, wider and longer than other nap mats. They are very comfortable but also very heavy and cumbersome to set up and put away for daily naptime and take up a lot of space so I ended up getting more cots for naps indoors.

The fabric on the lounger cushions is intended for outdoor use so that is where we used them most – for napping or relaxing in tents or on the deck etc. When not in use they were stored in bags in the big shed. During the Vacation 2019 renovation, ‘Frankenshed’ was disassembled and the new toy storage shed was too small to store the large cushions so they were brought back inside and again stored with the other cots and bedding.

The small room off the main playroom is used for napping infants and storage of cots, bedding, books, and bulky items I don’t want to haul down to the basement storage area. This area is still sometimes referred to as the ‘Nature Area’ because I left the trees in there from when this used to be a play area – written about in the Nature Area and the Quiet Space posts.

Now, this is when the snowball began to form…

I recently wanted to use the big cushions for a toddler activity, but found it was very inconvenient to get them off the shelves behind the tree branches. I decided that on the upcoming long weekend I should move the trees into the main playroom. Afterall, though it did look nice having the tree branches forming a canopy over the cribs, it would be wonderful if the trees were in the playroom where everyone could enjoy them.

So, I started looking for the best place to mount the trees in the playroom…and decided that I would first need to move the toy food counter…which then meant I would need to change the block storage area. *sigh* The list of necessary changes continued to grow and after thirty plus hours of demo, rearranging, building and organizing the playroom has been mostly ‘prepped’ for the arrival of the trees but, even with a three-day weekend, there wasn’t enough time to actually move the trees.

I am pleased with the new arrangement – so far – and the children seemed to like it too. All of the children in the current group have only ever seen the trees as decorations in the nap area – never as part of the play space. They are familiar with having other things in the play environment change but probably don’t realize these trees can be relocated. I am certain they will be excited when I manage to complete the project – and with the cushion activity too whenever I get around to that.

There are still a few more little tasks to complete before the trees get moved but hopefully that will be done this weekend. The snowball forming now it the growing list of paperwork that I should be doing 

Summer Recap part 2

 In my last post I covered some of the changes I had made to our outdoor play area. I mentioned that I had built a new roof over the little house in the corner of the yard and that moving the bus benches here made this a favourite sit spot all summer. However, I did not have a picture to include in my last post – but I do now;

I also promised to write more about some of our summer activities so that is what this post is for. Although International Mud Day occurs before my summer vacation, I never write about it until after. I didn’t write a dedicated ‘Mud Day 2022’ post but I can’t have a summer activities post without at least a couple mud day photos. This particular group was highly motivated to wash muddy toys so much of the activity was ‘mud on, mud off, repeat’.

The building area of the yard was popular all summer – surprisingly more popular than the water area or the climbing wall. Often, we had all eight of the children wanting to play here at the same time though they still preferred to create separate small ‘homes’ in a ‘town’ rather than work together on a single, large structure like other groups have in the past.

The gravel/digging area, of course, was always popular though usually only for smaller groups at one time. It was interesting to note that, no matter what the activity was, these two were always choosing to play together. The oldest and the youngest in the group – nine years difference in age – but they played so well together all summer. Observing friendships like this is one of the things I like best about having a mixed age group.

We also started a collection of ‘nature stuff’ to use to make mandalas. Some of the children only liked the ‘collecting’ part, others preferred simply sorting the items that were collected on our walks. Only a few actually seemed to enjoy creating the mandalas though.

As usual, we went to parks almost every day to play tag or other group activities that require a big open space that we can’t do in my yard. I almost never take the children to playstructures but we do love the climbers they have at St John’s Park.

Whenever the basketball court was empty, the children always wanted to play line tag.

Some of the children tried cutting tree cookies. Even though we only used small branches this was a surprisingly difficult/time consuming activity. The children who were persistent enough to cut all the way through were very proud of their achievement – so was I 

Fantastic Summer!