We stopped in Arkadelphia for lunch/dinner around 4pm and it was smooth sailing until we hit Dallas proper where we encountered construction and sat for another half hour. It was about 9:30 when we got in. Evie did great the whole ride. She fell asleep after we'd been on the road for a couple of hours and stayed asleep until we stopped in Arkadelphia. Then she happily played with her iPad, listened to music, and danced (while in carseat) for the rest of the trip. Addie and Will were asleep when we arrived, so she enjoyed the undivided attention of Uncle Ryan, Aunt Aimee, Tia and Tia's dog Boston. I think Boston was her favorite. She stayed up and played with Addie's and Will's toys for about an hour and then I took her to bed. Will's crib was still set up in the guest room and she went down easily without trying to climb out. I stayed in the room with her until I knew she was asleep and then went downstairs to visit.
Saturday morning the cousins were so excited to see each other. They gave each other big hugs, enjoyed breakfasting together, riding scooters and bikes in the foyer, and playing piano.
The morning was leisurely and around 11 we decided to go to the science museum. The kids enjoyed looking at all the taxidermized animals, the air chute that sent paper airplanes and other shapes up to the ceiling, and, of course, the dinosaurs. They also hit up the big green frogs on the way out.
Evie and Addie loved watching the paper shapes fly up the air tubes
The best picture I could get of all 3 of them successfully climbing a frog
Tia got off work at noon so we headed toward Plano to eat at Chuy's (our favorite Tex Mex spot) and meeting up with her. Evie had caught just the slightest bit of a nap before we got to the museum and I thought she would zonk out for the half hour ride from the museum to the restaurant but she stayed up. She was a little cranky while we were waiting for our table and kept wanting to run around the parking lot, which obviously didn't happen, but once we got our table and some chips, she was fine. Especially once everyone decided to come and do her hair. Addie had walked over to see Evie and then Tia came and showed Addie how to put Evie's hair in a ponytail. Not to be left out, Will hopped down and got a lesson too. And when it fell down, Uncle Ryan pitched in. I had a joke about how many Kreches it takes to put in a ponytail.
Can you see the gleam in her eyes?
I love how Will looks like a fearsome sailor here.
Evie wanted to help steer
We had such a good time on the boat that Evie didn't want to leave. She planted herself face down on the deck and cried, "I want more boat!" I finally convinced her to get up and look at some of the ducks, and she was happy again as we were leaving the dock. She loved sailing! And she slept good that night!
Sunday we just chilled at the house. Evie and Will showed us how hide and seek is done.
The kids enjoyed playing with each other, watching a movie, and Evie got a nap that day. Will had gotten sick to his stomach the night before so I let Evie nap for as long as she wanted to, hoping that she would stay healthy, and she did, but it led to her not going to sleep until 11pm (and this was the night of the time change).
Monday we left around 3pm after my conference calls at work and once we had all eaten lunch and let the kids play a little more. It was a great trip and I loved seeing Addie being such a sweet big sister type to Evie, and Will and Evie played great together. We are going to have to go visit more often now that we're within a reasonable driving distance again.
We got back home Monday night around 11 and put Evie down ASAP so that she could get enough rest to go to school the next day. Seth had a doctor's appointment bright and early in the morning and I had to accompany him, so Granna came over at 6:30 am before we had to leave and stayed at the house with Evie and got her ready for school. Grannadaddy came to pick her up and then dropped her off at school, and she handled this all surprisingly well considering that it was outside of her normal routine.
I had one of the biggest scares of my life this week when I went to pick Evie up on Wednesday afternoon. She stays for aftercare 3 days a week and there's been a lot of turnover at the school lately. First her beloved Miss Pam left, then the director of the whole school left a week ago, both of them with no notice given. I'm not sure that the director left voluntarily because things seem to have been pretty unorganized and we were just lucky that Miss Pam was as wonderful as she was because I think she really just took charge of her classroom and her kids. Evie's lead aftercare teacher left too, about 3 weeks ago, which I wasn't even aware of. So I haven't been too impressed with the school lately, which is a shame because it's been great up until Miss Pam's departure.
So I went to pick Evie up on Wednesday and I knew she would be in a different room than they had been in because of an email I got from the new director. What I didn't know is that she would have a new lead aftercare teacher. So I walked in and saw a teacher with a child younger than Evie walking down the hall toward Evie's aftercare classroom. The child said, "That's Evie's mommy," and the teacher turned into the classroom that Evie should be in and started calling for her. I went across the hall and signed her out and got her lunchbox and expected Evie to be standing there waiting for me at the classroom door. But she wasn't.
I said to the teacher, "Where is she?" She said, "I guess she's going potty." She looked in the restroom adjacent to the classrooms and Evie wasn't there. She looked in the one across the hall, where I had just been, next to Evie's regular classroom and, of course, she wasn't there. Then the teacher starts walking down the hall, checking all the classrooms and says to me, "Maybe she went down to the big restroom." So I bolt down there to check the big restroom and the big classroom at the end of the hall, which is where Evie used to have aftercare until last week. She wasn't there.
I stopped by the baby room where my friend Cristal is working and asked her if she'd seen Evie. She said she'd seen her about an hour ago at the potty next to her regular classroom. I said, "They can't find her," and I started up toward where the new aftercare teacher had gone, which, by this point, was back toward the entrance and the two other classrooms she hadn't checked so far. She said, "I guess Miss Juanita took her to the gym," and she walked out of the building to go to the gym building.
At this point my heart was pounding and I stopped by the office and told the new director, "Your teachers don't know where my child is." She was taken aback and apologetic and when I mentioned that the lead teacher said Evie might be with Juanita, she said, "Juanita has a habit of taking children off somewhere else." My eyes got big and I said, "You know, ever since Miss Pam left, I don't know what's going on but it's not good." She asked me how the new classroom teacher was working out and I said, "I don't know, but this definitely isn't." How could she ask me that when I still don't know where my child is?!
I walked out toward the gym and found the lead teacher walking around to the other door of the gym - she had been knocking on the closest door and no one had let her in. I followed her to the other door and she knocked and no one responded. She said, "Let me go get the key," so we walked back to the main building. By this point I am in complete panic. What if someone took her, what if someone let her out of the building and she's halfway down the block, what if she went upstairs in the building and is wandering around the offices up there?
Finally when we got back in the building, someone noticed Miss Juanita standing in the classroom across the hallway from the office and Evie was in there. I scooped her up so tightly I almost crushed her, and we got her things and headed to Granna and Grannadaddy's where we were going to have dinner and Granna was going to keep her while I went to choir practice. It took probably a full hour for my adrenaline level to even out and as I was driving to choir, I called Seth and told him the whole story. I realized that I was completely worn out and felt like I had just run a marathon. It was very traumatic.
Today Seth and I met with the director and got the story: supposedly Miss Juanita was returning from taking a group of kids to the gym and saw Evie using the restroom next to the classroom by the office and Evie got swept up with those kids. Juanita stopped with her kids to visit with the teacher in the classroom where Evie was finally found. (Though when I saw Juanita yesterday, she told me she had been on the phone with her mom who had an emergency, so I don't know...) I told the director from my point of view everything that was wrong with the whole situation.
- The lead teacher who let Evie out of the classroom to use the restroom should have been watching her to make sure she went where she was supposed to and came back when she was done.
- A single teacher should never go off by themselves with a child or group of children, and especially not to the gym which is in a whole other building.
- Juanita should've returned Evie to the correct classroom when she saw her, not just scooped her up and said, come with me.
- If Juanita had an emergency call (which the director didn't seem to have heard about), she should've handed off her kids to someone while she took it.
- And even if none of the rest of this had happened, that new lead teacher didn't know me from Adam, but she didn't ask to see my ID and she was already calling Evie's name, which indicates to me that she would've let me go with her without checking.
Come to think of it, and I didn't mention this today because it just dawned on me, Wednesday was the first time I'd met the director, and she didn't ask to see my ID either to confirm that I was actually the mother of this child and had permission to take her home....
Anyway, according to the director, she has verbally reprimanded and written up both teachers, has sent out a reminder of the policies via email (which she forwarded to me at my request), and has spoken with all of the teachers to remind them of the policies that address safety. She agreed to my request that they conduct a training session for all the teachers and that they keep a list of people who are able to check out each child available in the room the child will be in at the end of the day.
I don't even know what to say about it. Other than she won't be going there after May because we already had her enrolled at a different daycare closer to our house, but we hadn't made the decision yet of whether to send her there for the summer or to keep her at her current daycare which is moving locations. She's already scheduled to go to a Montessori program in August and we didn't want her to have to make any more transitions than necessary, so we were considering letting her go to the new location but keep the same teachers and classmates. But now that Miss Pam is gone, the only thing that would be the same is the classmates. I hate to have her move to the new school by us in June and then again to the Montessori in August, but I just don't see the advantage in keeping her with this school that's moving to a new location and seems to have a lot of things to work out. Eesh.
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