Jenny have you thought of looking for a way to use your teacher training to help providers with ideas such as what to include in a circletime - songs, poems, craft ideas, feltboard stories. I have been doing some make and take workshops for caregivers and it is a great way to use my teaching background. Truthfully unless you are lucky enough to have older children in your daycare it can seem a lot like babysitting because so much of our time is taken up with meals, diaper changes/potty training, handwashing and napping. At the same time for me my teacher training was back in the 80's and academically the push for kids to know stuff sooner and sooner means that I am pretty much teaching the preschoolers what I was taught to teach the older kids back then so I do use my training.

It is hard when family/friends start asking why you are wasting your training but I don't see it that way as I opened my daycare because of my own children and wanting to see them learn what I could teach them and then when they grew up and on their own I realized I was teaching in a way that I had made my own. It wasn't the curriculum I learned in teacher's college but it was the skills I learned in college that I was applying to running my daycare.