Froggy - I found a couple blogs awhile back that had a bunch of pretty easy freezer meals. We have a few favorites: BBQ Pulled Pork, Chicken Broccoli Alfredo, Taco Soup, Hawaiian Chicken. And then I also make and freeze soup and warm it back up in the crockpot. So I've got a couple freezer bags of potato soup in the freezer, and I'm making some butternut squash soup this weekend and I'm thinking about freezing the extras.
As for gym daycares - I worked in daycare for years, and my mom spent her whole career working in daycare, teaching preschool and then was the director of a daycare for a very long time. The biggest difficulty that gym daycares would have in being state regulated is the adult to child ratio laws. I don't know about other states, but in the 3 states I have lived the child ratio is usually 4:1 for children under 2 years old (4 children to 1 adult), and 10:1 for children ages 3-5. A regular daycare requires parents submit a schedule and they can staff according to the schedule, and they can turn away drop ins if there isn't space (or don't accept them at all). A gym daycare is specifically designed to be for drop-in care, which means they can't predict staffing. So they may only have 1 child in the "infant/toddler" group and then have 6 or 7 of them suddenly but they will only have any given child for at most an hour or two (depending on the regulations they have in place) because of the nature of a gym. They also aren't providing food for the children, if children are needing snacks/etc that is all the parents' responsibility because of those same reasons (food was the second big state regulation that we had to deal with at daycares).
The list goes on forever. The state does look at safety things too, but their bigger issues tend to be ratios, food, and spacing (I feel like I've walked through a million state inspections in daycare) and a lot of those just aren't applicable in a drop-in setting so state regulation wouldn't be required.
Either way I'll do a thorough walk through and check of the daycare but I go to the YMCA right now (only because it's the closest place with a pool) and their daycare is very open (windows all around so I can see in all the time) and it's always clean, organized, and nothing ever looks amiss.
Ally - I'm with you. I'm so tired, but am not sleeping well. Once I do get to sleep I end up waking up to go to the bathroom and can't go back to sleep because she's squirming around keeping me up.
Chi - I'm definitely getting the flu shot. It's strongly recommended, both to keep us protected while pregnant and hopefully keep baby protected after birth.
In my case I work in a school and I see over 140 students each day. They are always sick AND right now the flu is going around our middle school and high school like an epidemic (and I don't mean the mild "sniffles, a little vomiting and feel achy" bit, but the full on influenza where people are out for over a week recovering). And, in my case, I have weak lungs from bad cases of pnuemonia + bronchitis and my asthma can't take it so with an already low immune system now even lower thanks to pregnancy, I am not risking anything and am definitely getting the shot. I get it every year but this year is more important to me because of baby
