Woolsey Day Care

It feels nearly impossible to truly express how grateful my husband and I are for Neelam. She’s warm, friendly, engaging, and incredibly organized. After touring a few other day cares, it was the only place we felt comfortable sending our daughter. We couldn’t recommend her more highly!

We brought both of our kids to Woolsey day care and are so fortunate to have found such a warm and loving place. Neelam has over 30 years of experience and it clearly shows in the way she calmly delivers such excellent service. Our kids were incredibly comfortable at the day care and Neelam is incredibly nurturing. She raises the kids with love as if they were her own children. I highly recommend!

Neelam gave amazingly loving, gentle care to our one-​year-​old for about 5 months when I started back to work. Her unflappable calm and the small setting provided such a nurturing environment for the kids. She really pays attention to the children and knows their personalities and needs very well — every day she would report what had happened and any new developments — be they new foods, words, or social interactions. She was absolutely amazing at understanding baby babble. She often noticed before we did when our daughter was getting sick (and with an older daughter in preschool, that happened a lot!), and helped her develop happy sleep routines. We would highly recommend her.

I went to this place because of good reviews on the Berkeley Parents Network and an advertisement claiming that she takes only 4 children. In reality, there were 6 children. She said she would not do part time, but then later took someone on part time. My baby often came home with very soiled diapers, face covered in snot showing that he had done a lot of crying. The children watched videos every morning, something I would not have agreed to and listened to music all day from Pandora with advertisements (it’s only like $ 20 a year to not have them). She sleep trained my baby, even though that is something we did not discuss nor something we do.
We took our baby out of town, and when we brought him back, he was a bit fussy and needed time to orient. Neelam refused to take him the day we came back because it would not be at the start of the day. Fine, the next day and every day after that, she called us to pick him up after an hour and a half to a couple of hours because the baby was fussy and needy. My baby is very mild mannered and easy going usually and only is fussy when something is wrong. Neelam said that he just had to re-​adjust, and that she was leaving him in a pack and play crying, expecting him to fall asleep on his own like he did before. I told her that he probably just needed to be held a bit, and that at home he would need comforting but fall asleep after 5 – 10 minutes. She said that wasn’t her routine and that he just had to adjust.
After a several days at Neelam’s not getting a nap and coming home traumatized from being there, he had a fever. We later realized that the baby had been sick all week with a sore throat. It turned into an ear infection and a dangerously low temperature — he’s never been so sick.
After the baby recovered, we tried to bring him back to Neelam’s, and the same thing — she would call us after an hour or two and ask us to come get the baby. Granted, we’ve paid for the whole month, and we have to leave work immediately to take care of the baby. One day, my spouse was sick and I had to be at a meeting across the Bay. There weren’t any other kids with her that day, as all of the other children have foot and mouth disease, and she kicked out the other baby who was in the group for being too needy. When I picked up the baby after 2 hours, she had fed him 2 bottles, one of which was half full and needed to be thrown away (which is a shame because we get donor breastmilk). (She also gave a full bottle of breast milk once to a different parent to take home by mistake, and I presume they threw out the breast milk after all the work the poor donor did!)
The short version — I don’t fell it is a place where my baby can get his needs met. She is insisting on getting paid another month’s full fee despite that she hasn’t taken care of my baby for a month for more than a few hours a day and isn’t able to do so. Now, we don’t have care, have lost significant time at work, despite that she charged the most I had seen at any day care.