A Man in Child Care

Well when I say open, we still have a few areas yet to be finished! But we have an Open Day tomorrow

What an adventure it’s been over the last few weeks and what a huge achievement to have arrived at the point we are at today. We can’t thank our builder, Rew, enough for his fantastic efforts and really the rest of the team – electrician, plasterer, gardeners, fence people, flooring man, Jeanette the decorator, Ian for his new windows, Paint Pots staff and the people from the West End church congregation, who have all pitched in and gone the extra mile.

So we are very excited about a new Paint Pots and the families who will be joining us. The new rooms look fantastic.

As I said, we still have a way to go to get finished – maybe another week’s work and then some days tiling etc. but it doesn’t seem possible that we can show people round tomorrow.

Howard Road children are enjoying the fruits of Mrs W’s recent ebay activities. She went a bit mad bidding on dinosaurs and trains so we have lots of both now. Apparently, all of the trains at Howard Road had disappeared – down a siding? driven off by the fat controller? or more likely slipped into a pocket by Thomas the Tank Engine fans. Is it sexist to observe that these are predominantly boys?  I think we need to frisk them on the way out! or maybe install one of those detectors you have to walk through at airports.

Maybe we could have red and green channels for children to walk through – oh dear, I’m off on another of those lateral thinking exercises again.

Anyway, we all had the trains out yesterday afternoon. There was a wounded dinosaur on the track – J took it to hospital, E decided to break up the track, S became chief engineer demonstrating how to erect the new bridge, our trains launched off into space then explored the sea bed. Somehow, they ended up on my head, with one in my ear. We went for a world record number of carriages joined together – thankfully distracting everyone way from my head & ears!

……. and only 2 toilets needing to be unblocked!

Highlights of the week? -

• Set up the last of the laptops so all nurseries can do their planning on computers
• Looked after a poorly little boy for 2 days while his brother was in hospital
• Filled out a very detailed cash flow model for Hampshire County Council
• 2 year old E told me that both mummy and daddy had dropped him off at nursery today and that both mummy and daddy were picking him up together!
• informed parents of annual price increase, limited to 2% – provoked one indignant email (so far) and one comment expressing surprise that it was so low!
• Updated the website with details of Paint Pots 5
• Ordered some road safety signs for a car park
• Wrote a report for planning department to try and increase our numbers.
• Yet another trip to Ikea!
• Negotiated a lease and new windows
• Cuddled an extremely cute baby