could it be? is it she?

By george, I do believe we may have found the daycare for us! M and I went on yet another daycare interview this morning. We knew it was a home daycare in a nice part of town, but as we drove up into the hills, the houses got larger and larger and I was tempted to turn around, thinking, "all right, we'll never be able to afford anyplace up here so we should just not torture ourselves by maybe liking it." But we persevered! And it was so lovely! The daycare owner, Dawna Fantastic,* met us on the porch and actually remembered our names from the intro phonecall last week. We walked inside to meet 6 or so little guys in various stages of crawling and walking. One of Dawna's assistants came up and whisked Gabriel away. I waited for him to cry, but he didn't. He played with toys and watched the other kids and hardly looked for me at all. The house is, as stated, large and lovely, but in a homey, child-friendly way. We just sat and talked about the kids and Gabriel and their particular set-up, all the while Gabriel was enthralled with the teachers and babies. I had already decided this is where I wanted Gabriel to be and was so scared to ask how much it was. But I did, and oh, my god, she's NOT charging an arm and a leg. It's still expensive, of course, but it's less than our rent, which was really our big cut-off. There was another day care I really liked that I visited with my parents right before the move. This was a lady just starting out in the daycare biz, but she had teenage kids of her own and I got a really good feeling about her. She was charging, though, $10 per hour. Let's see, 9 hours a day, five days a week, four weeks a month works out to, holy crap! Anyway, Dawna had one spot available and we said we'll take it and the minute Gabriel wakes up from his nap, I'm driving down there to leave a deposit. I feel positively giddy! She gave me a hug as we were getting ready to leave and I nearly cried. I am actually hopeful for the first time that this returning to school thing will NOT be a total disaster.

*Almost her real name!