What I found with doing telephone interviews was that it was easier for parents to write me off and not want to come for an interview making up some excuse about having several to do this week and would get back to me even though that is not what I was given to understand in initial email contacts. In a sense that in the personal interview you can say things and get information and your policies don't come across so harsh. Another reason I don't like sending out the contract ahead of time. I like to work with the families and explain why my policies are the way they are and how it will effect them.

At the same time unless I get a family needing care right away in January they are going to be told to call me back in January as I am not in the mood to do interviews right now. Having a hard time getting into the mood to do anything Christmas. Our first crafting day was a bust cause the girls didn't want to do anything - too busy playing. So scrapped half of what was planned, scaled down some of the other ideas and changed things out to be more like what we usually do which is read a book, and colour a picture related to the book and then glue something on which I have precut. Girls are now 26 months and 37 months and neither uses scissors or gluestick, they don't like getting glue on their hands but sometimes I can get them to spread regular white glue on their page with a stick to put something on but rarely. They will spend an hour at a time playing playdough and just now learning to cut their dough with a plastic knife so we clearly have a long way to go.