Childcare

Have you considered home daycares? They always seem to have spots. Try Wee watch

I had this problem where I live in Kelowna, BC. I applied while pregnant and was on all the waitlists. My baby is almost 9 months old now and i started to panic because I had not heard back from anywhere. Someone told me I should call each place instead of waiting for them to reach out to me. I got offered 2 spots at different 2 well-known daycares that should have been full. They wanted me to start immediately, though. So just call all the places and try to speak to someone, they have quick spaces that show up sometimes and they do not want to go through the stress of going through waitlist and calling all people who may have gotten other spots already.

This. We were also on waitlists when pregnant with my youngest and she didn't get a spot until she was nearly 2. We bridged the gap with home care. There's probably a local FB group. That's how we found our daycare. The cats giver was great. If she weren't so far away we probably would have kept sending the youngest there.

Or you can ask other mom's at early on if they know of any daycares with space. Our early on in Mississauga has a WhatsApp group and they recently mentioned an open spot

Also from Burlington - its a disaster. You have to bug them every few days. They don't reeeally seem to follow waitlist order from my experience. Oakville seems to have a bunch that are switching in/out of the CWLECC or whatever program, which might help open some spots in Jan and Feb. Home daycares (through Wee Watch) are also a good option if your baby is old enough. Be relentless! Good luck.

We ended up finding a local home daycare through a Facebook group in our area. Significantly more expensive but you do what you have to when licenced daycares are full. We were mostly happy with kiddos care. He is home with me now because I am on mat leave and we have updated the one list and wee watch for when I return to work 🤞

Do you have any family that can help out? I put my son on 4 waitlists when I was 5 months pregnant. He finally got a spot a month shy of this 2nd birthday. My MIL would watch him for us.

Babysitters!

It's the same in our town in BC 😞

I’m in Brantford and had to wait just under 2 years to get into my preferred centre (I also needed 2 spots for twins). I had to use a private home daycare when I first went back to work at 18 months. The wait lists are outrageous because everyone puts their name on all the lists as a backup but are really gunning for one or two centres. It’s good to call initially and introduce yourself, then follow up with the manager via email about once a month to express that you are still very interested in that centre. They usually shuffle the classes around a bit at the end of June and a lot at the beginning of September when the pre-k kids move on to JK. Check in just before those times especially, because even if you’re 20th on the list, 1-19 might not even want that centre, and they will know that you do. Also, the sibling rule for YMCA is making it harder to get infants in because infants with an older sibling already attending the centre get priority 🙃