About Me:
marcia@daycareanswers.com

Hello. I'm Marcia Reagan and I am co-founder of Daycare Answers, along with my husband Mike. Mike and I have been married for nineteen years and have lived all over the United States because of his career in radio. We have two awesome teenage children, Shawn and Jenna.

I have been operating a successful in-home family daycare business for fifteen years. My goal now is to share the experience and knowledge I've gained with daycare providers and parents during the journey of caring for and raising children.

I learned at a very early age that I had a natural ability for caring for children. When I played house as a child, it was automatically assumed that I would be the “mother”. I started babysitting neighborhood families when I was twelve years old and made quite a career out of it. I had a long list of clients and had jobs an average of five days a week. I figured I’d grow up, get married, have kids and start my own daycare.

Well, I grew up and got married. We decided to wait to have our first baby because Mike’s, job required us to move someplace different around the country about once a year. We went from Wisconsin to Montana to Maryland to Oklahoma, back to Wisconsin, then to Iowa and finally to Minnesota. If that wasn’t enough, once in Minnesota, we moved from a duplex, to a small house, to a bigger house. As we moved around, I received valuable experience in so many different fields, you wouldn’t believe it! I worked in restaurants, at a law firm, a car dealership, a hospital, a mortgage company, an experimental aircraft association and a bank! But all that time, what I really wanted to do was raise kids and start my own daycare.

In 1991, Mike and I decided it was time to get our family started. I was so excited when I found out I was pregnant! Finally, my dream had come true. But every woman’s worse fear happened. I had a miscarriage. I didn’t know one person could cry so many tears. (I actually just started crying again as I typed this.) The one thing I wanted most in my life was gone. I felt like God played a really mean trick on us. Luckily for me, I have a truly amazing husband who was able to help me through this devastating time.

In 1992, I got pregnant again and was lucky enough to have my first baby. A boy named Shawn. We were starting our family and everything seemed perfect. Then at Shawn’s three month well-baby visit, we found out he wasn’t as perfect as we thought he was. A three month old baby’s heart is the size of a golf ball and Shawn had a hole in his heart the size of a quarter. He was a pretty sick little boy. We hadn’t realized he was sick for two reasons. One, an infant’s heart works opposite of the normal heart. The blood pumps in and out of the opposite sides it normally would until the infant is about three months old. That’s why his hole was discovered then and not at birth. Second, we didn’t have any other children. We didn’t even realize his breathing was double time.

Shawn had open heart surgery when he was four months old. It was an extremely scary time for us. It was awful handing our new baby over to the surgeon not knowing what the outcome would be.

The hole is Shawn’s heart was so large, that the patch they put on it during surgery did not seal the hole. We were told they’d give him a couple of months to recuperate from the surgery and then he’d have to have a second surgery. Fortunately, that second surgery never came. They didn’t know why, but Shawn was able to breathe and develop normally even with the heart condition he had. The specialists keep a close eye on him, but have delayed surgery indefinitely. To this day he has a heart murmur, but is able to function as any normal teenager.

Now that I had my family started, it was time to start the daycare, right? Wrong. You see, Mike started work at an ungodly hour in the morning. That allowed him to get off around 1:00 p.m. He let me know that he did not want a house full of strange kids every day when he came home from work. I understood his feelings, but it didn’t stop my urge to have my own daycare.

I bided my time working in the office of a water softening company, but there was something about me I could not continue to ignore. I wanted to stay home with my baby boy. So, I attempted an in-home bookkeeping business for small companies that did not have an office of their own. It was extremely hard to operate this type of business with a little one in the house, but I gave it my best shot.

Two years later, I had my second baby. A girl we named Jennifer. When Jennifer was born, Mike agreed I should start my daycare business which would allow me to be home with both children. Not only was I able to start my childcare business, but over the first couple of years, it grew into an extremely successful operation. I loved taking care of the daycare kids, my own children adjusted well to having so many other kids share their mom, and Mike was very supportive and helpful in my business venture.

Fifteen years later, I have plenty of hands-on parenting and daycare experience. I learned valuable information about raising children. Over the past couple of years, I felt like I wanted to share this information I have learned. I was always able to share advice and experience with the parents who asked for it, but there was so much more. I see young, new parents struggling to find the answers they see on successfully raising their children. I didn’t know how to get my words of wisdom out to them because:

• If they didn’t ask for it, I didn’t feel I should offer advice to them unsolicited.
  
  
• I didn’t know to start writing a book.
  
  
• I struggle too much with stage fright to present seminars.