Nursery hours

[nurserychoices]

Hi all, I know there's been a couple of threads recently but I didn't want to start a new question there. I have a DC who's almost 7 months and we're due to start nursery when he's around a year old. When he does it'll be the full day so 7.30 to 6pm. I am considering sending him 3 days to nursery for a couple of months, then increase it to 4 days for another 2/ 3 months, then 5 days afterwards. financially we can afford this and my employer seems flexible.

My question is would this be disruptive to my DC or would it be better to start 5 days straightaway? If you're a nursery worker, have you seen children settling better if they do the full 5 days right from the start? Thanks.

The main consideration I’d have is whether the nursery is able to do this… as they won’t hold the extra days open for you unless they are paid for - and there would be no guarantee that the extra days would then be available once the few months are up. (This is the case at our nursery). DD went full time from 6 months old… 730-1730 each day… she is 2.5 now and still loves it. No regrets about sending her full time from us- we got into a routine quickly and it worked and works for us .

My DD went to nursery from about 11 months so she could get used to it before I went back to work. The nursery were really accommodating and allowed us to "scale up" the time she spent there. So she started with 2 mornings, then 3 and then started doing one full day plus two mornings...and on it went until she was doing the 3 full days she's been doing for a year now. If I needed to up it to 4 days they would say yes if they had the space/staff and to be honest she might be a bit tired the first couple of weeks but would soon adjust. I highly recommend scaling up like that just because we found it such a good experience, and she settled so quickly.

thanks both for your comments, that is helpful. Nursery so far has indicated they can accommodate this, as long as we give enough notice to them. Part of it definitely me being concerned too about juggling work at the same time, so the scaling up approach would allow me to settle back in as well!