Starting work at Family Day Care in 1986 at just 50 cents an hour per child, Shepparton’s Hazel Lee has seen the changes day care has gone through over the years.
Now after six different bosses and various pay raises across 35 years, she’s decided her time has come to start enjoying the retired life.
“It’s a good time to just retire you know, because you want to enjoy life at some point,” Mrs Lee said.
“Another major reason why I decided to finish, was because of COVID-19.
“It was, you’re on, you’re off, you’re on, you’re off. I just thought, I can’t do this anymore, I should just retire and get out of it.”
Family Day Care is a council-run program that employs trained educators to take care of children in their own homes.
Mrs Lee started working at Family Day Care as a way to earn extra income while looking after her own four children at home.
Despite not expecting to be in the job for long, over time she found the work enjoyable and made the decision to keep going.
“After my kids grew up and left, I thought, well, I enjoy this, it suits my lifestyle, I’ll keep going,” Mrs Lee said.
Finding herself surrounded by children all the time, Mrs Lee attributed her love for the job to the children and their parents who made her work so rewarding.
“I loved working with the kids. Some of the parents were really great too,” she said.
“I really loved talking to the parents when they were picking up kids. I got to know a lot of the parents really well.
“And that was rewarding just to have a yak with them about their children, it was good.”
Despite enjoying her work as an educator, Mrs Lee has found retirement suits her and is excited to enjoy the simple things in life that the job would often restrict her from having.
“I can just go up the street whenever I want; I bought a dog; I can go over and have a coffee with a friend at the spur of a moment; I can keep my knives in my drawers and in the sink. It’s little things like that,” she said.
“You’d start at 8am and finish at 5.30pm, by then nothing’s open.
“You can’t get into the doctor or the dentist, for example. Those things were really hard to get into when you were working.
“People don’t realise what you miss when you’re tied down like that.”
However, the job brought about nice moments, which always made Mrs Lee smile, such as often being greeted by the familiar faces of the kids she once cared for, later in life.
“When we did the kitchen two years ago, there was a guy that come in,” she said.
“He was an electrician, a young fella, and said to me, ‘I used to come here’. And I thought, really?
“I do now remember him coming here but initially I thought he was joking.
“I’ve had a few cases like that happen before.”
After all these years, Hazel is happy she got to be a part of the lives of all the kids she’s looked after, knowing that she played a part in their growth.
“I loved seeing the kids develop into nice little kids and be happy to go off to school,’’ she said.
“Some of them came along really shy and withdrawn a little bit and after you’re finished with them a couple of years later, they’re developed more and are ready to go to school and move on.
“You know you’ve done your job right when they’re happy to go to school.”