We went to Devin's birthday party this past Saturday. Devin is my friend Tamara's son. She is a good friend from college. The park the party was in was in Los Gatos and had a train and a carousel. Devin is really in to trains. Wyatt enjoyed the carousel quite a lot. Rus took him on a couple of times. I got some very funny pictures. I think that if Wyatt prefers anything, it is animals. He seems to be fascinated by making animal noises right now. When he says "horse" it actually sounds a lot like "rus" which was very confusing at first.
Wyatt was a pretty good little guy the whole time. He walked around a lot. Yes, he tried to escape, or rather take off in his chosen direction, but he had a good time and delighted a lot of people. He had cake and ate the small amount of food we could talk him in to. Actually I had to give him a time out because he bit me. But other than that things were pretty good. Thankfully, he doesn't bite anyone but Rus and I.
The only strange thing that happened was Wyatt saw some older kids (like 3-year-olds) going up a flight of stairs. He wanted to go up so he held my hands and started walking up the stairs. This other kid at the top of the stairs kept saying "no, baby you can't come up here." This with me right there with Wyatt. I seriously wanted to scream at him. He repeated this every step (there were around 20) until we got up to the top where he just stood in our way. His mom repeatedly told him to just worry about himself and Wyatt was fine because his mom was with him. I don't know what his problem was. His mom pulled him out of our way and he laid down on a bench. Wyatt being the sweetheart that he is went up to him, but near his feet. I actually moved Wyatt because I was afraid that kid might kick him in the head.
A less severe example happened yesterday at the playground near our house. A little girl, again about three, kept saying "no baby" to Wyatt constantly. She wasn't standing in his way, in fact, I think she kind of liked him, but I still had this instanteous reaction to scream at her. Later I heard her saying the same thing to her little brother and I calmed down about it.
It makes me think that Wyatt needs more play experience and I need more play experience with him. I am concerned I am becoming insanely overprotective. Wyatt doesn't seem phased at all by any of this, although he wouldn't go to the top step because that kid was in the way. Clearly, Wyatt isn't getting a lot of play interaction at day care with his peers. Another subject which infuriates me.
I talked to someone at Bananas, the child care referal agency for our area, about the situation at day care. She is going to send us some listings of new day care places we can call. She said we should visit twice, once without Wyatt and then maybe again at a different time of day with Wyatt. She said we might go through more than one group of listings. I feel intimidated. I also feel bad for Wyatt because here we are taking him out of SmallTrans, Seth will come home then we will dump Wyatt in a new completely unfamiliar day care situation. That feels pretty shitty.
She said she was confident that we could find a new situation for him. She also said we might want to try some more play groups and she would send us a listing. She also recommended we talk to the Director of the day care, even if we don't want to keep him there. She mentioned ADA and to my surprise thinks it applies to Wyatt. She said unfortunately a lot of centers have this philosophy that if the child is moving like a baby then they are put with the babies. We might have more luck with an in home day care situation. She said what they are doing isn't right and they are obligated to make adaptation under the law. I should hear what they have to say about why they are doing what they are doing. I admitted that I probably should, but at the same time there isn't really anything that they can say at this point. They clearly aren't interested in doing the right thing or providing Wyatt with a developmentally appropriate environment.
OK, I am getting really angry again, so I need to stop writing about this now.
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Venting is good, but instead of getting angry, which doesn't resolve anything, you need to discuss your concerns with the director. Look at it like a problem you would need to solve in the workplace, how would you handle it? If you don't want to do it face to face, send the director a letter, if you can do it without getting upset, or have Rus write a letter.
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