Abby: I gotten cakes from Pine Garden before; I think it would depend on if they have the toppers available. Previously, I wanna a 3 tier cake with care bear toppers; they do not have the toppers, so i need to get them myself. So far we find their cakes quite nice in terms of taste..
Monster: will u be engaging a CL for your confinement? I find reading books are not very useful; it would be more effective learning from the CL with a real baby. Then once u have gotten the hang of it, google online for specific issues like eating, illness etc.
Orangey, WOW, ur comparison is very detailed leh. I dun blame you for 'condemning' ifc cos of your #1's bad experience. Btw, how come your IFC fees so expensive at $1.7K??? Issit some pretigious cc??
For me, my #1 is in IFC (Sparkletots) since 4 mths. I must say i am very lucky cos I feel the teachers there are very caring. Althou the max ratio is 1 teacher to 5 babies, in reality, the ifc cannot cope with just 2 teachers taking care of 10 babies. My ctr has abt 8-10 babies at any one time and they have 4 full time teachers + 1 assistant teacher. I agreed with you that the teachers may not be really qualified but at least i can tell they really took good care of my baby. I do agreed that some of the teachers are just 'doing their work' and not really passionate kind, but as long as they dun abuse my baby and is hygienic, we are okay. They are very conscientious about temp taking too. They will take temp before i hand the baby over and will call me for every small thing, like baby viomitting, fingers swollen due to insect bites and even finding a small spot on my baby's body, to ask me to fetch baby home to see doc for fear of HFMD, etc. I also agreed with you that there is always a issue of rushing to pick baby up before 7pm.
But despite all the cons, we are still intending to send #2 to IFC. We feel that a nanny is 1:1 and there is a issue of not knowing what the nanny has done to the baby (unless it is really someone we trust totally). At least in ifc, there are so many pairs of eyes, the teachers would watch one another. We also like it that in ifc, the teachers and babies are multi-racial so my baby get used to around people of different races and she enjoyed the interaction with the other babies. I also feel that in ifc, becos there are so many babies, no one can pamper my baby and she got equal treatment as every other baby. With a nanny, dun think we would be putting our babies for long term cos by the 2nd/3rd year onwards, we may want to enrol her in some kind of cc and we are worried that by that time, may have difficulties getting a vacancy at cc.
Anyway, that is our plans as of now. We hope everything goes well, else, we may need to explore other options when the time comes..
more suitable for our budget will be the one from Inglesina that will accommodate newborn baby to 18kg toddler. I know that the same model is going for $269 at Taka Baby Fair, which is $10 cheaper than Baby Hypermart. Might consider getting a 2nd hand one so not going to buy so soon.
