Mortimer

Salina, KS-Joy Mortimer is not Superwoman and she doesn’t have kryptonite stored in her garage; however, she does have the ability to be incredibly efficient when it comes to her family child care business. Not only is Joy efficient, but over the past 14 years that she has been doing family child care, she has also learned to be resourceful.

The pictures of Joy’s family child care business, Bundle of Joy, portray images of a well-designed facility, one that many would say was created by an architect who specializes in child care. In reality, though, Joy Mortimer’s FCC home is just that, in her home. In addition to her child care business being FCC, Joy also maintains as normal of a lifestyle outside of her “day job” as possible.

Her perspective on how to do this is just the perspective that many FCC providers are looking for, yet have been unable to find. Mortimer says, as she is explaining how her facility was turned from a part of her garage into a child care facility that, “It’s a profession, it’s a career.” This perspective is both innovative and meaningful in that it demonstrates how any child care provider should approach their profession.

Just as if a cashier from a local grocery store were to bring home groceries to bag each night, Joy finds that mixing work with home is not an option. When I asked her why this philosophy was so important, she responded by saying that she didn’t want her house to look like a daycare, so instead she made part of the house into a daycare. Joy’s house and child care facility weren’t always separated. She began the remodeling of her garage after she and her husband refinanced their home about 6 or 7 years ago. They then decided that with the $5,000 that they had from refinancing, in addition to some grant money that was picked up along the way, the best way to spend the earned money was to create a semi-separate facility for Joy’s child care, using part of their garage. A workshop for her husband was also built using the leftover space provided by the garage.

Joy’s initiative to remodel her garage is not the only initiative that she has capitalized from. Joy has also been involved in programs such as T.E.A.C.H, KQRS, EXCEL, Smart Start, and both the CDA process and the Accreditation process. Through these programs, she has earned her Associate’s Degree in ECE from Cloud County Community College in 2003, her CDA in 2003/2004 with help from the CDA class at CCCC, she became the first FCC provider in Saline County to become Accredited in July of 2005, and she is in the process of earning her Bachelor’s Degree in ECE from a virtual program offered by Ft. Hays State University.

Joy Mortimer has been a busy woman over the past 14 years. She has been able to participate in most of the programs listed above because she took an interest in the classes that were offered and the education that was available when she first began her FCC business.

Even though she began child care on a whim from the encouragement of her sister-in-law, after moving to Kansas from her native state of California, she admits, “I wasn’t doing very well when I first started.” She also claims that she thought she knew what she was doing until she began to attend classes, which is when she realized that she wasn’t doing everything right or even efficiently.

As for now, Joy believes that she has found that mixture of the “grandma at home setting and the institutionalized setting” that she was looking for when she was originally wanting to put her own kids in child care, and when asked about her most encouraging moment, she tossed the idea around until she decided that having her facility completed was indeed the most encouraging moment she has had while doing child care.