I am Jolene's mom. Jolene is almost 7 weeks old and my first baby. In 2006 I began working at a child care center. What I thought was just a job to have a job ended up being life changing. During this time I was going to OCC and taking my prerequisites for nursing. In order to work at this particularly amazing daycare you had to be going to school for early childhood. I went to OCC for free so it wasn't a big deal to take an extra class in early childhood. My first class was with Betsy. I loved it! Not only could I relate my everyday interactions to what I was learning at school I was good at it too. I decided to switch my degree focus to early childhood. I went on to get my associates and then bachelors degree in early childhood.
I worked at Little Oaks from 2006-2010 and it was the best job I ever had. My co-workers were amazing! The children and families were just as wonderful. They did this thing called Family groups. You would start in the infant room with a group of tiny babies and you would stay with the same group until they went to preschool, moving from room to room with them. It was fantastic. You really got a chance to bond with the families and form secure attachments with the children. I loved my family group! They were my babies! I was forced to quit in 2010 when an evil corporation came in and took over our company. It was awful, I was separated from my family group and coworkers and forced to start over at another job.
Over the next 6 years I worked at a home daycare, a community preschool, at head start and then finally taught pre-k for lake orion school district. Lake Orion Pre-K was almost as awesome as Little Oaks. The only reason it didn't totally compare is because it wasn't infants and toddlers. I love the infant/toddler age. Preschool is pretty awesome too but nothing compares to the cute little innocent faces that don't know how to get sassy yet.
So here I am working at my second awesome job teaching pre-k when I get pregnant. I never wanted to be a stay at home mom. I always dreamed that I would work at little oaks and bring my baby to work with me like all of the other moms did who I worked with. Now here I am with an awesome job and the opportunity to stay at home. It was a hard decision but I chose to stay at home so I could be my babies teacher. I want to do all of the fun and awesome things with her that I did with my babies back at little oaks.
This is how we got here today. I am going to make a blog about all of the activities I do with Jolene. A lot of the things I do will be inspired by the high scope curriculum. I'll explain my love for that in another post. Basically, I will follow her interests and the things I do will be hands on and "process over product". I'm also a parent so I'm going to throw in some parent pleasers as well. I will do my best to explain my logic behind it all. All of my great activities and ideas so far (🙄) will have to wait until another post as my baby needs me now and my fingers are cramping up. I hope you all find it as interesting and enjoyable as my cousin Cindy, who suggested I put my ideas into a blog.
