Illustrations: Tallulah Fontaine
Single parent Kayla Proulx supports her four-year-old daughter with a job at Walmart. Her shifts are often from 4 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and she usually works weekends. Needless to say, finding child care to cover her non-traditional hours isn?t easy.
When Proulx got the job, her daughter, Ruby, was 18 months old. She had two weeks before she had to go back to work, no family members nearby to help care for Ruby, and she knew a regular, nine-to-five daycare wasn?t going to cut it.
Fortunately, she found an out-of-the-box care solution just in time: Heart of the Family, a 24-hour daycare near her house in Cornwall, Ont.  She was able to keep her job, and that anxious pit in her stomach?the one we all get from time to time when competing childcare and work issues have us backed into a corner?finally melted away. Located in a former Catholic school building, Heart of the Family is a licensed, 24-hour daycare for infants through age 12. It currently serves more than 300 children and is designed to meet the needs of parents who need non-traditional child care because of shift work, part-time jobs, course work or night school, or a combination of all of the above. (Teen pregnancy rates are high in Cornwall; part of the daycare?s mandate is to help young mothers finish high school or college degrees.)
Although the centre started modestly in 2009, demand for spaces is exploding. The wait list for the infant room alone, says executive director Christina...