Daycare

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s a home-based day care provider, I am often asked for my best advice to help ease the “goodbye drama” that sometimes happens when a parent leaves his or her child at day care. For new parents, this is a big concern. Will my child cry? Will my child suffer? Will my child understand?

My answer is always the same, “It depends on your child’s age and it may actually be harder on you than on them.” Of course, this doesn’t mean your child won’t cry or cling onto you or sometimes even melt down for a moment, but it does mean that this transition from parent to child care provider or teacher is usually fleeting and absolutely dramatized.

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CareLuLu now has one hundred child care providers from the DC area listed on our site! All of these daycares and preschools are licensed and meet State or County standards. Many of them exceed those requirements!

For those child care providers that agree to let CareLuLu staff visit their facilities, we created the Verified seal of approval. These Verified providers undergo a much longer and more thorough review process answering over 100 of our questions. For these Verified providers, CareLuLu visits in person to take high-quality, real-world photos. Their profiles feature more detailed information to give parents the most up to date and complete overview. They include verified and in-depth reviews, which are written based on the feedback we receive from child care providers, parents whose children attend (or have attended) that specific center, and our staff that visits the facilities.

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uick question: What’s most important to you in a daycare? Please click here and take a minute to answer this 1 question. Please share with other parents! THANK YOU! 🙂

When I needed to find a daycare and a preschool for my girls, I spent days on Google, on the phone, and then visiting child care providers. I visited 16 centers before settling for the one that felt right for us. In this post I will share 10 tips that I hope will help you in your search for finding great and affordable child care.

1. Start your child care search early, as far as a year in advance, especially if you live in a concentrated urban area like Washington D.C. or San Francisco. This is even more important if you will be looking for an infant. It’s usually more difficult to find space for an infant than for a 3 or 4 year old because of the teacher-to-child ratio: for infants, you must have 1 teacher for 3-4 infants (depending on the State) but for a 4 year olds, it’s around 10.

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e are very excited to announce that Jen and Patrick, founders of CareLuLu, were on Let’s Talk Live on NewsChannel 8 today, Tuesday, August 6th at 11:30am. They were invited to the show to present CareLuLu, a free online resource they created to help parents find safe, affordable, and high-quality child care. The video will be coming soon! In the meantime, check out our facebook page for more photos from today’s segment. We’d also love to hear your feedback on our site and see how we can improve our service to you!

I’m proud to announce that CareLuLu is now live! We’ve been working hard for the past seven months and are extremely excited to finally show you what we’ve been up to!

CareLuLu is the most convenient way for parents to find a daycare center or preschool that fits their family’s specific needs. The idea emerged after Patrick and I, like many other parents, struggled to find the right daycare for our girls. After realizing that finding a daycare was no easy task, we decided to build a resource that would allow parents to quickly find and compare child care options.

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