How did you find child care for your LO?

happy_un-bride

I've been looking at the Day Cay Centres in the area, but I'm curious about my other options and how to go about finding maybe an at home child care provider or a nanny.  I just don't know where to start.  I'm in the west end suburbs of Toronto.

TIA!

jlaOK

We called a BUNCH of places.  We've used both a center and an in-home.  For each we figured out what aspects were important to us and made a spreadsheet with those items.  We called and asked questions based on those aspects.  We went and visited our top spots and made the final decision based on that.

Karla CS

We found our center through a referral, but we also would have found it just from a google search.

For in home, at least in the states, you can go to your county website and pull up a list of licensed in-home daycares based on zip code. This is a really tedious process - we called all 31 in our zipcode, and only two had infant openings. 

You can try craigslist also, but I don't find that to be the most reputable place to search for childcare, and it's hard to look up licenses - the license is provided based on the DCP's (ie: Sally Smith) name, but they operate based on a business name (ie: Sally's Super Daycare).

I agree with the spreadsheet - we mainly just used ours to keep track of which DCP's we called, price, drop off hours, etc., and then a comment for our thoughts after doing a tour or calling.

It's a really frustrating process. I think for a while, you just feel miserable while you're doing it, but if you invest the time to find a kick ass provider, it will make going back to work that much easier.

ebp913

I found our daycare center from a referral from a friend.  We hired a nanny after #2 was born and found her on care.com

honeybee111

We found our nanny on care.com.

bionic4me

Our State's Health Department audits licensed daycares and will list audit findings on their website. So, we went there to find daycares in our area and made a list of daycares to visit.

My coworker also referred her son's daycare and told me a lot of great things about them. We looked them up on the website and there were not any findings, so we added them to our list. Between visiting daycares and my coworker's praise of the daycare... we went with the one she recommended. We are very happy with our choice.

MNgirl326

I googled daycare centers in my area and then called and asked for information.  I took some tours and also went online and looked up center names and parent reviews.

ccam

We knew a center would be the way to go for us since we only needed care part time.  So that narrowed it down for us.  Then we went by location since we wanted something pretty close to home.  From there, we asked around, got a few recommendations, did our research and toured a couple centers.  We went with our gut on the center we picked and DS is doing really well there.  Word of mouth would be the place to start. 

LoCarb

I searched my states website for licensed centers and in homes. I looked at any violations to rule places out. Read online reviews, cold called places and finally toured or met with the DCP.