A Day in the Life of a Childcare Provider Who Works From Sunrise to Sunset

Aurora, Colorado

By mid-afternoon, Nabila Chehab has worked nearly a full day running one of Colorado’s universal preschool sites out of her home. She’s been awake since 5 a.m. and on her feet for hours. 

By 2 p.m., two 4-year-old girls from the preschool program remain in her care. They will be picked up in the next hour or so. Then the doorbell rings and two more girls — 5-year-old Amira and 2-year-old Nadine — burst through the front door and head straight to the back of the house, joining their peers in Chehab’s classroom. 

Chebab’s first shift of the day is almost over, but her second shift is just starting. 

Around 2:30, she prepares an afternoon snack of watermelon and Goldfish for the four girls. It is the first of several meals she will prepare for Amira and Nadine over the next seven hours while their mother works at a food and beverage stand during a concert at Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre, about 30 miles away. (The 74 is using the children’s first names only to protect their privacy as minors.)

As they munch on their snack, three more kids arrive. These are Chehab’s grandchildren — ages 6, 5 and 1 — and the older two sit around the table as she prepares fruit and crackers for them as well. 

The naturally lit, brightly colored back room is alive with the chatter and boundless energy of young children. If Chehab is losing steam, she doesn’t show it. The 61-year-old just smiles and serves. 

By day, Chehab is a licensed home-based childcare provider. Her program, which can accommodate up to six children at a time, has earned the highest quality rating from the state. These days, she is primarily focused on serving 4-year-olds in Colorado’s relatively new universal preschool program, although she enrolls younger children as well.  

Chehab is only a few years into this arrangement. Before opening her program, she cared for her grandchildren as an unlicensed family, friend and neighbor provider. And prior to that, she worked as a teacher for 15 years and a director for five years at center-based programs, she said. 

Chehab is licensed with the state to provide care from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Mondays through Fridays, but she continues to help families outside of regular business hours. On Saturdays, she hosts a three-hour Arabic class for young children. (Chehab moved to Colorado from Lebanon in 2009.) On Sundays, she cares for three young children while their parents work. And then, about once a week as needed, Chehab cares for Amira and Nadine in the evenings while their mom works at the concert venue. 

The kind of childcare Chehab provides on weekends and some evenings, often referred to as nontraditional hour care, is used by about 40% of children under age 6 with working parents. It is most often provided in people’s homes through a mix of licensed and unlicensed care. This type of care can take place in the early mornings, late in the evenings, overnight and on weekends, based on the diverse needs of families. Often, providers like Chehab make themselves available during nonstandard hours only after a family that is already in their care has a change in plans or needs more help. 

That’s what happened with Amira and Nadine. 

Last school year, Amira was enrolled in Chehab’s universal preschool program. Nadine would occasionally join her older sister at Chehab’s house, so both girls became familiar with the provider. 

The girls’ mother, Marissa Kishell, has been working at Red Rocks since 2022, she said, taking shifts about three nights a week during peak season, which spans from spring to fall. Kishell’s mom — Amira and Nadine’s grandmother — would watch the girls at night while Kishell went to work, but when the girls’ grandmother got in a serious car accident in fall of 2025, she was unable to care for them for several months. 

Kishell enlisted Chehab’s help in the evening for the first time back in January, when she had a one-off work event, she recalled. When the Red Rocks concert season kicked off this spring, she began to turn to Chehab more often. 

“No one had ever watched them, especially at night, except for me and my mom,” Kishell said. “With everything that goes on these days, it’s hard to trust your kids with people.”

She worried, initially, about how it would go — but more so about how she would do leaving the girls than how they would do with Chehab. 

“She’s always so welcoming. Her house is cozy and clean,” Kishell said of Chehab. “I was never worried about if they would be OK.”

Now, Kishell will typically get her work schedule about a week in advance, she said. Then she’ll ask her 73-year-old mom — who watches the girls for free — which nights she can take them. Often, Kishell said, her mom will commit to all three nights but then, as the week goes on and she becomes more tired, she might ask to offload a night or two. (Her mom recovered from the car accident, Kishell said, but her energy level is not the same.) That’s when Kishell will ask Chehab, who lives about a 5-minute drive away, to take the girls for a night.

After hours of playing, the girls tell Chehab that they’re hungry. With Amira and Nadine in the kitchen alongside her, helping as much as they can, Chehab prepares a meal of lamb ribs, brown rice, Lebanese yogurt, salad, hummus and bread. The girls sit down to eat around 5:30 p.m. with Chehab, her husband Yassine Ahmed and a family friend. 

This is one of the elements of Chehab’s care that Kishell deeply appreciates. Both of her girls are “very comfortable” at Chehab’s house and “have a lot of fun there,” Kishell said, but it’s more than that.

“It’s nice for me that they get more of a home environment, and they’re having a home-cooked meal, and it’s more of a structure,” she said, “than going to a random babysitter’s house.”

That’s important to Chehab too. It’s central to her philosophy as a provider. 

“I don’t treat my families like clients,” Chehab said. “I treat them like family.”

Kishell pays about $30 per hour for Chehab to watch the girls in the evenings — $15 per hour per child — which she figures is about what she’d have to pay for the average babysitter. With Chehab’s experience and classroom materials and quality rating from the state, she feels it’s a great outcome for her and the girls. 

After dinner, Chehab helps the girls wash their hands then takes them on a walk around the neighborhood, during which they spot airplanes flying overhead. 

Back at Chehab’s house, she takes the girls into the greenhouse in her backyard, where they look for ripe vegetables to pluck and place in nets. Chehab’s garden is varied and sprawling. Inside the greenhouse, she has tomatoes and cucumbers, along with herbs such as parsley, cilantro and mint. Elsewhere in the backyard, she grows green grapes, sumac, apples, pears and peaches, although she said the fruit trees have not borne fruit during this especially hot summer. 

Both Amira and Nadine come out of the greenhouse with a few cherry tomatoes and finger-length cucumbers. 

“This one is so big!” Amira says, admiring her cucumber. “I want to take mine home.”

Chehab helps the girls wash and pack their vegetables to take home later. 

Kishell saw the vegetables from the garden when she got home that night. The girls also brought home a flower craft they’d made. These kinds of keepsakes make Kishell especially grateful. 

“I don’t think they would get quite the same experience with anybody else,” she said. 

Kishell’s appreciation is not lost on Chehab. 

“She values my work with her kids,” Chehab said of Kishell. “She sees how they improve.” 

At about 6:45 p.m., Nadine begins to rub her eyes and show signs of sleepiness — she skipped her nap today, Chehab said. “She’s ready for bed.” Instead, Chehab will try to keep them occupied until pickup, which Kishell prefers.  

Kishell’s husband, Mo Shesao, will pick up the girls at 9 p.m. Shesao has his own car shop, where he works as a mechanic. He usually stays until the work is done, Kishell said, so if someone brings their car in midday and needs it back by the next day, he’ll keep at it until he’s finished. 

Some nights, the girls stay at Chehab’s later — until 10 or 11 p.m. On those nights, Kishell will pack them a bag with toothbrushes, hairbrushes and pajamas so they can get ready for bed before they are picked up. Occasionally, Chehab said, Nadine will fall asleep at her house. Usually, though, they’ll wait until they are in the car or at home. Both children are accustomed to a 10 p.m. bedtime at home anyway, Kishell said. Since she stays home with them during the day, they have nowhere to be in the mornings and will often sleep in.

Chehab reads stories with the girls until about 7 p.m. Nadine picks out, “Big Gorilla: A Book of Opposites,” and Chehab quizzes the girls on opposites. 

“What’s the opposite of short? What’s the opposite of night? What’s the opposite of heavy?”

Next, Chehab sets up a paint station for the sisters. They don aprons and each pick out three colors and a paintbrush. As the girls get going, Chehab says to Amira, “Tell me about your picture.”

Amira has combined her three paints to create a dark blueish-brown hue, which she is trying to use to cover the entirety of her paper. 

“It’s going to be different,” Amira says, answering Chehab. She thinks about it more, then adds: “Spooky.”

As they finish up, Amira tells Chehab and her sister, “Next time, I’m going to take this to the museum … so they can hang it up.”

It’s August, so at 7:30 p.m., it’s still light outside. The trio heads outside to sing and dance with scarves. Chehab gives no indication that her stamina is flagging. She continues to play with and engage the girls as if the day is new. 

Around 8 p.m., the sky darkens and the girls go inside to have one final snack. They eat pretzel sticks and drinkable yogurt with straws in the basement while Chehab finds them an age-appropriate show to play on the television for 15 minutes. (She watches the clock closely to make sure they don’t get more screen time than that.) 

Once the girls are settled with their snacks and show, Chehab and her husband roll out their prayer mats and kneel to pray a few feet away. Amira can be heard slurping the last few sips of her yogurt while her caregiver quietly recites her prayers.

Around 8:30, after night has fallen and with only a half-hour left at Chehab’s, both girls become more subdued. They lay together on Chehab’s couch, still giggling and muttering, but more softly now. 

At 8:55 p.m., a car horn can be heard from the driveway. Moments later, the girls race to the front door to greet their dad. Then they give hugs and kisses to Chehab and tell her goodnight. As quickly as they’d entered the house earlier that afternoon, they now exit it, leaving a strange stillness in their wake.  

Chehab’s night is nearly over too. She will prepare her Turkish coffee for the next morning, take a shower, pray once more and then go to bed. She’ll wake up tomorrow, without an alarm, at 4:30 or 5 a.m., she said. Then she’ll head to the gym, where she swims every day, and return home, ready to greet another group of young children. 

This story was supported by New America’s Better Life Lab Childcare Reporting Grant.