Just another week

Post warning IT IS LONG..........

This week has been a stressful week for me. Starting with Monday. I drove to work and found out we had no power at the daycare. Apparently there was a car accident and the car hit the power pole and knocked it down. This was about 1 pm Sunday. The daycare I work for is for Mercy Hospital employees and of course you can't just have the doctors and nurses come and get there children. So........... they put us in a conference room over at the hospital. It is great that Mercy has that option. They put 2yrs-5yrs in the big room and used smaller classrooms for the infants and toddlers. So imagine this you have over 90 children from age 2 to 5 in one room. You have none of your normal supplies. A few things were brought over from daycare but not enough. You have this huge room and they are playing movies almost all day (which just makes the noise volume higher.) not many children were watching it, with various toys around the room.
A row of folding chairs were used to keep 2's on one side of room. There are plenty of teachers but only a few were doing anything. So you have all this chaos and noise and maybe 4 teachers working and 12 others just standing around. They wanted to feed the children cereal and milk on the floor. Yeah I didnt see that happening. So after a few spoken concerns we got nutri=grain bars and juice boxes. Not enough to fill them up. Now in my classroom I have 3 difficult children and believe me this set up was not conducive for them. Of course my co-worker who normallys finds an excuse to leave the classroom about 20 times a day was one of the ones not working. So any problems with the difficult ones was left to me. She was either not in the room or she was over with the the two year old she was not helping just talking to other teachers.We left the room a couple of times just to have stories and calm the children in my classroom down.
For lunch we sat on floor with sheets like a picnic. The kids thought that was great. There milk was frozen. So the subsitute was water. But at least the got a decent amount of food. Nap time we normally have cots with sheets for the children at the daycare. But here they laid on floor with sheets and blankets. About 4:30 my co-worker comes over to me and says it hasn't been too bad today. WELL yeah if you dont do anything it is not that bad. A few good things came from this experience though the third floor supervisor saw that my co-worker doesnt do her job. (Thank goodness I only work with her 1 day a week.) And that my concerns are not just complaints about her not doing her fair share . But yet she can be negative about children.
We learned a few things like how things are done in an real emergency. The hospital did bend over backwards to help us meet the basic needs of the children. The parents were really glad they didn't close the daycare. The hospital just happened to be full that day. Maybe the higher ups will realize that we are an asset to the hospital.
By time I came home from work I was exhausted and went to bed early.
Now because we lost power for almost two days (because it was not repaired until late Monday night) all the food in all the refrigrators were spoiled and had to be thrown away. They started Tuesday off with toast and some juice for breakfast. Lunch comes from the hospital and they had gotten a shipment of milk so they got a regular meal again. By Friday I believe we were actually back to normal. Each classroom has access to a refrigrator so teachers bring things in to eat at lunch but if it was in the fridge it got thrown out. No teacher was reimbursed so if they weren't there on Monday they didn't know they wouldn't have any food. The teachers have to provide their own meals. I had called my co-worker that is in the room everyday except Monday so she was prepared.

So even though I have Tuesdays off I still was dealing with power outage fall-out. The difficult children in our room have been really off all week. So next week can only get better right. Not really I will be in class all alone for the week Co-worker is taking spring break off. I may start coloring my hair to cover the gray that has suddenly appeared LOL