Wally’s World Daycare

Our son is now almost 2 and he’s been at Wally’s World since 6 months. What can I say about this wonderful place? He’s happy and well mannered. He speaks to us in Spanish — mostly commands like ¡siéntate! or aqui. We love the fact that he is learning. He sings Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and is working on his alphabet and numbers. What more can we ask for? He continues to sleep 10 hours at night and about 2.5 hours during the day for his nap. I can’t really take credit for all these things — we really believe it’s because of Wally’s World. As the old saying goes «it takes a village to raise a child». If that’s true — Wally’s World is our village!

We love Wally’s World! More importantly, our son loves it, to the point that he doesn’t want to come home in the evening!
This is the third daycare we tried in the Bay Area and this is by far the best. The ladies who take care of the kids are just great. Every time I visit I have the sensation I am seeing my grandmother (or a nice aunt) in them. They are all very warm and friendly to both the kids and the parents. Our son loves them so much that he doesn’t leave before giving them a kiss every day.
The daycare has a HUGE playground. This daycare was built by merging three Los Altos lots so the playground has the size of three average lots! This is by far the largest playground I’ve seen anywhere. The kids have a lot of place to run around and tons of toys to play with. Plus, these are old lots, so there are plenty of trees for shade. It even smells like a real forest…
We also like that they focus on education but in a relaxed environment. At least by Bay Area standards: most kids do know their ABCs and how to count by the time they are three years old. However, everything is organized as games and there is no pressure for the kids to learn if they don’t want to.
Lastly, this daycare has a program to teach kids Spanish (an instructor comes every day). And it shows. I see that most kids around three have a basic Spanish vocabulary (numbers, body parts, toys, common objects and verbs).

My wife and I LOVE this daycare. (Full disclosure: the review by Deb B. is from my wife so this review refers to the same child as her review does, but we both wanted to write independently about our experience.) A friend referred us to it, otherwise we never would have known about it. We were very nervous about leaving our son with anyone else when my wife had to go back to work so we visited a bunch of daycares, including all four of the Stanford daycares (since we both work there), and Wally’s World was our favorite by far.
The key thing that made it stand out from the rest was how caring and warm the nannies are there. When we met them, we felt comfortable that our son would receive the love and care he needed in those early months, even when we had to be at work. These ladies just seem to have so much love for the kids that it gives the whole place a warm, family feeling.
It’s an in-​home daycare, which helps give it that feeling – and they really do a beautiful job of creating a sense of community among the families – but it’s also big enough that they have space for kids to play, inside and outside. The owner (Wally) occasionally throws parties for all the families, which are a lot of fun and a great opportunity to meet other parents. It’s also common for parents to stick around for a little while at pick-​up time to socialize with other parents and play with their kids.
One of the other things we love is that all the nannies speak to the kids in Spanish (until they reach the nursery school level, when they have one Spanish-​speaking and one English-​speaking teacher and the kids spend half the day with each). Our son is at an age where he’s starting to talk and understand when people talk to him, and he’s bilingual! We’ve watched the nannies give him complicated instructions in Spanish (like «Please come here and sit down now so we can put your shoes on. OK, now give me one foot. Now the other») and he follows them perfectly! We’re thrilled by this huge extra benefit he’s getting.
It’s really just a wonderful place and we feel incredibly lucky to have discovered it.