Little Big Childcare

🌟 Join Us For Our Baby & Toddler Stay & Play Group! 🌟

👶 When: Mondays 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
📍 Where: Stepping Stones Day Nursery - Mirfield

Join us for Interactive play, sensory activities, baby weighing scales and more!

Our stay and play group is a great way to introduce your little one to a nursery environment, in a relaxed way. Perfect for little ones and a great way to meet other parents.

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"Rear facing legs - let’s break it on down ⤵️ ⠀

Our adult perception leads us to believe the following:⠀
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'🤯 Their legs must be so uncomfortable⠀
🦴 Their legs will break rear facing in a road accident⠀
🙈 They have no room'
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What if I told you rear facing legs are way more comfortable and safer rear facing than forward facing? You’d laugh at me right….but it’s true!⠀
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➡️ When your legs hang off a barstool - do you leave them hanging or do you put the on the bar? You know it - you put them on the bar. WHY? Because if we leave them hanging the blood flow get’s cut off = sore legs! Rear facing kids always have somewhere to rest their legs and take the pressure off. Forward facing kids legs get sore from hanging and they often kick the back of your vehicle seat to try and wedge their feet on the pocket on the back of the vehicle seat to take the pressure off. ⠀
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🦴 Rear facing legs don’t break - why? Because their legs always follow where the head goes in a road accident. Rear facing child are thrown back into their car seat, as is their head and their legs glide back towards their head. Forward facing, limbs can break being thrust forward into the front vehicle seat under crash impact.⠀
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🚨 Newsflash guys - you’re not 4 anymore. Nor do you have the flexibility of a small child. Little people are like contortionists and get themselves into the most awkward positions all day and have not a care in the world. Their rear facing space does not affect them.⠀
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So….please don’t let YOUR adult perception of their legs affect keeping them in the safest position in the vehicle for as long as their seat allows. ⠀
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Rear facing is 92% safer."



(✏️📸:)

How amazing does this play group look?! I can’t wait to take my littles along, it looks so much fun! 🍃

⭐️ FOIL BLANKET PLAYTIME ⭐️

Babies adore the sights and sounds of laying on or playing with a crinkly foil blanket. Place objects on the blanket to explore, as baby gets older he will notice the patterns made by the blanket, and the sounds created as the blanket is scrunched, shaken and kicked.

Never leave baby unattended or unsupervised with a foil blanket, and if baby dozed off, be sure to move them or the blanket away for a safe sleep.

Richard and I would like to announce the safe arrival of this squishy little creature, our baby boy, Alfie.

Alfie completed our family on Sunday 12th June, and already has us all wrapped around his tiny little fingers. The girls are absolutely smitten, and are already proving themselves as the best big sisters!

Fresh, clean and tidy Playroom 😍 I had a long overdue playroom clear out this week, going through puzzles to clear out those with missing parts, reorganising everything back into the correct bags and boxes (after toddler-tidy ups) and locating *most* lost wooden pieces.

I still can’t find the centre of the wooden rainbow though.. if you were the centre of a , where would you hide? 😅

Uh oh… she’s ranting again...

First post in a while, as I am winding down for maternity leave, but as my newsfeed is currently filled with the rumours of increased ratios, I felt that I needed to put my side across, and after posting in a childminder group and receiving countless messages of agreement, it seems that I am not alone in my thinking. I can only apologise for the length of ranting!

***

So, childminders are to save the economy by taking on more work but putting our prices down for the pleasure…

I mean, aside from the fact that childminders (along with nurseries etc) are already underfunded, overworked, underappreciated, and increasing ratios directly results in decreasing child safety… it’s a fab idea… eye roll.

Childminders are businesses, just like any other. It’s a small business, yes, and the majority of us do it because we adore the little ones that we work so hard to welcome into our home… but we are businesses! Our main purpose is to pay our mortgages, and feed our families. Many childminders are barely staying afloat.

Increasing our ratios will increase our costs. The resources we need, the consumables we go through, the outings we pay for. The risk level will go up, so insurances likely will too. The work load will also go up - as much as people assume it’s just a hobby, childminders are lone workers, caring for up to 6 children at a time. It’s an exhausting, never ending juggling act of cooking, cleaning, changing nappies, planning and preparing activities, tracking development, chasing small humans around playgrounds, and doing everything we can to support the families that we work with in every way that they need, all whilst trying to stop little Timmy hurling themselves off the dining table and reading the gruffalo for the 784th time that week. Adding another child into that pot, whether it’s increasing the over all number of children or just the number of early years children, is going to increase that amount of work. A lot.

Most importantly, it’s going to decrease our ability to keep children safe. We are lone workers. Every additional child, brings additional risk, but I still only have one set of hands, one set of eyes, and one head. I would love to see the people proposing this increase take a group of 6x 1-8year olds on the school run, crossing main roads, and not losing any. I swear the school runs alone will turn me grey by 35. Or try taking 3 toddlers to a playground - where they all run in different directions, one towards the fast moving swings, one straight to the highest point they can find, and the third instantly trips over their own feet. I might look calm and collected (I probably don’t), but inside I am constantly counting heads, risk assessing, and praying that no one asks me to push them on the swings for 40 minutes. It’s bloody hard.

And yet, it’s proposed that we increase our numbers, and drop our prices? Putting it politely… why on earth would we want to do that? Who in their right mind, as a small business owner, is going to want to increase their work for free? Would you approach a taxi driver, and ask them to drive twice as fast, so that they can give you two journeys for the price of one? Or maybe say to a restaurant owner, here’s a table for 4, I know there are 6 people on it, but I’m sure you won’t mind only charging for 4 since you’re cooking anyway. Of course not. So why would childcare providers do that? It’s the common misconception again that childcare is easy, cheap to provide, and a glorified hobby. It is not the responsibility of childcare providers, who work damned hard to provide quality childcare and the best start in life for the children we love like our own, to subsidise childcare by making a loss. For too long the government has been pushing us to do this, by threatening to increase ratios, and underfunding supposedly ‘free’ childcare at the providers cost, and then wondering why we are facing a childcare crises with providers closing left right and centre. I don’t know what the answer is, but it isn’t reducing the quality of care that we are able to provide by expecting us to fund it for them.

Busy sorting out my (admittedly far too big) nappy stash, after spending the week deep clean/sanitising them. It feels so satisfying to see them all on the washing line again, Pip toilet trained around a year ago so the nappies have been in storage for so long!

But now, with baby3 on his way, it’s time to start sorting through! A very kind friend generously gifted me lots more pocket nappies this week too, and I hadn’t realised quite how many I had to begin with, so I’m planning on donating the surplus either to a nappy library or to a family in need once I know what I have got.

We have some spaces coming up over the next few months, both for under 5’s and before/after school.

If you are looking for childcare, get in touch to arrange a visit! ☀️