Best Child Care Inc

I enrolled my child at Best Care at 3 mo of age. I had visited them when I was pregnant to check them out. It was a convenient location and former neighbors of ours recommended them. I liked that it was a family run business and everyone was very nice. Mostly I chose Best Care due to location, though. I also thought that a class A center would be nicer than a class B (not necessarily true at all).
Right away there were things that weren’t terrible, but that I didn’t like. The infant room was so small that the teacher could hardly move without stepping on a child. Only one to two (max) infants could be on the floor mat at a time and they were practically on top of each other. I didn’t like that there was carpet – it’s hard to clean, looked ancient, and little kids are all over it. What I really didn’t like was when my 3 month old baby came home smelling like the teachers body odor because she chose not to wear deodorant. That is disgusting. I bathed him and started looking for a new daycare immediately. I also saw (twice) infants in his room (3 – 6 mo) being fed by putting them in a car seat and holding bottles for two of them at a time. I understand that they may need to be fed at the same time, but that is against state regulations. Infants are required to be held for feedings. They should have had the person that was the floating helper to come help with feedings. If an infant started to choke they would have had a hard time getting them out of the car seat straps in time to help them.
Other things that influenced me to leave Best Care were the things I saw with the older children. The infant room is right across from the kitchen and every morning I saw that the kid’s breakfast was high sugar cereal (fruit loops, cocoa puffs) 3 days a week and either waffles or french toast sticks drowned in syrup the other 2 days. No protein, nothing but crappy sugar. Lunches were also full of the crappy processed food that we don’t eat in our house and I want limited at my son’s school. Chicken nuggets and tater tots, etc. I realize that most day care centers and schools serve this type of food, but I wanted to find something better. It would be nice to have some consideration given to nutrition (call me crazy). My kid does not need gourmet food or organic everything, but I’d like him to have something at least slightly healthy.
I also had safety concerns. After looking them up on the DCFS website (which I did before he went there and obviously missed things) I saw that they had been sited multiple times for allowing employees to start work before they cleared their background check. Wow. Really? I don’t care if they had stellar references, I want the background check cleared. I don’t know how they weren’t shut down after 3+ incidents. I also did not like the unlocked front door and that there frequently was no one at the front desk. I saw kids put in time out at the front door (literally standing with their noses to the wall 2″ from the door) and the person on front desk duty get up and walk to the back for something and be gone several minutes. In that time, a child could have ran right out the door.
After seeing all those things in the 3 months we were there (and I was actively looking for a new day care for one of those months), I removed him from their care when he was 6 months old. We are now at a wonderful place. I no longer feel anxious at work and rush to pick him up as soon as humanly possible. I know he is safe, clean, engaged in developmental play, and very happy where he is at now.
If you wonder why I didn’t give Best Care only 1 star after listing so many bad things, it is because I do think that the people are nice and they mean well, they simply don’t have the same concerns that I do and obviously have an «if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it» mentality. I had a much lower opinion of them until I went all over town looking at day cares and saw that Best Care is a million times better than most of them. There are some terrible places out there that are just store-​rooms for children. Best Care is certainly not the «best care» they claim to be, but they are far from the worst from what I saw.