"Is that a bloodstain on her bib?" "No, it's just feces." "Oh OK...wait what?" (aka, How Allison got pulled from day care)

For months now, I've been tremendously unhappy with our day care. We liked it when we toured back in the pregnancy days, but things were bad by the time we started dropping the girl off.

As of this week, we're done with the place. (There was much debate among my Internet-savvy friends about whether I should name the day care here...for the moment, I favor not doing it in hopes they'll improve. But I will say it's near the intersection of Alford Avenue and Interstate 65.)

Anyway, back to the story:

In recent weeks, Karen kept saying that things were great when she picked the baby up each afternoon. But when I was dropping her off in the mornings, it was like playing a game of "Find the Violation."

A few highlights, so that you don't think I'm being persnickety:

1. At first, despite asking, we got no report cards on when she was eating, napping, pooping, etc. Then, after multiple requests, we started getting incomplete cards. (She ate once today! And never got changed, apparently! Unlikely.) Eventually, after much grousing, they started giving us decent reports.

2. At least three times, I found one teacher in a room with 8 or more babies. Once as many as 10. The state doesn't allow you to have more than 5 per teacher. I once insisted on staying in the room until someone else showed. It wasn't long, but that was an awkward minute or two. One time, they even left Karen BY HERSELF with the babies. Hoo dog. This whole thing was merely laziness and poor organization...there was always plenty of staff to oversee the kids.

3. They keep no record of giving her medicine, like gas drops. Once, they plain forgot to give her Tylenol when she had a fever from vaccinations. That's really bad. They got defensive with Karen, blamed her for not telling them, then eventually admitted that they had just forgotten.

4. One morning, the state inspector was walking up to the door while I was there. What ensued was no less than a full-on freakout. Staff screaming, panicking, running around in terror, making me fill out forms I had already filled out, admitting they didn't know where to keep the forms, etc. But they apparently passed the inspection OK. The place was generally clean. I'll give them that.

There were other small things, like the fact that I've never seen anyone smile in that entire building, but I'll skip to Monday's story.

Karen went home sick, so I went to pick up Allison for the first time ever. It seemed fine; two teachers were watching two babies, Ally was happy, etc.

But then the teacher went to change her diaper one last time, and I noticed that there was a dark red stain on her bib and on her outfit. This was especially freaky because Ally doesn't eat anything but formula yet.

I asked if it was blood, and the teacher said, "No, she had a really big bowel movement today. It was everywhere."

It took a while for my brain to process this. Not blood: good. But wait, that means there was feces next to my kid's chin for a few hours? And that was cool?

To be honest, I didn't know what to do, so I just took her home and told Karen. We both agreed it was preposterous and called the assistant director. (We had never seen the director on site.) The woman got defensive, kept telling me it couldn't have been poop. She also kept calling Allison "he," which didn't go over well with Karen.

Finally, they called back and said that someone had "spilled sauce" on her, and they had forgotten. I'll admit that's better than feces or blood, but why was someone pouring sauce over my baby? Were they wheeling her around in a hot dog cart?

They gave us no apology and no real reason to ever bring the baby back, so we quickly called another nearby day care and snagged a spot for the next day. It's not great...but tremendously better in terms of people skills.

I had a long talk with the director on Tuesday, and it's mainly because of her profuse apologies and promises to "address every concern" that I didn't name them here. She's also supposedly refunding out payment for this week.

This is already a rambling post, but let me finish with a few tips for those who might be looking for a day care someday:

1. Pay more attention to the people than the facility. Both are important, but we made the key error of picking the more-organized place with the crappier staff.

2. Face the fact that affordability has its price. The truly good day cares seemed outside our price range, so we settled for one that was "meh" at best. Since then, we've just focused hard on juggling the budget to meet the reality that we're going to have to shell out big bucks for a place that will actually treat our kid the way we would.

3. Get on a waiting list early. I know everyone says this, and a long waiting list does not a great day care make. But if the place doesn't have any waiting list, there's very likely a reason.

I laugh about a lot of this stuff now, but the truth is that this situation has been a massive, almost crushing source of stress for me. Looking back at this list of warning signs, I keep thinking I should have yanked her earlier. But all I can do now is hope that I learned an important lesson with little more harm than a vaguely blood-looking sauce stain.