Moving to Roanoke; advice on preschools/children's activities/pediatricians (living in, eat)

[Roanokebound]

Hi All!

Our family will be moving to Roanoke in July. We will be living in SW County. I'm looking for preschools for our 3 year old and wondering if anyone has any recommendations. Mainly looking for a few days or half days. The two I've contacted already are Country Bear Day School and New Vista Montessori and both seem good. Any thoughts? Do certain preschools tend to feed into certain schools?

Also, what types of weekly activities would you recommend for children (age 3 and 4 months)? Are there good parks/playgrounds? What about swimming pools? Are there any kid/mommy play groups or classes?

Lastly, we are looking for pediatrician recommendations that are within the Carilion network of doctors. Any suggestions?

Thanks! Any information for us new-to-towners would be much appreciated!

[Kreutz]

country bear. Its close and very good. honeytree reeked of feces when we toured it.

we use the carilion pediatrics on Postal drive, dr patterson is really good

Penn forest elementary has a great park, and right near the new library with a great kids room.

[Roanokebound]

Thank you!

[Life'sABeach]

My daughter was 5 months when we first moved to Roanoke and enrolled her at Country Bear.

She's always been a slow eater, so to hurry her up, they asked us to move her to medium flow nipples. We tried that for about a week. During that time, she was using a weeks worth of bibs in one day because she couldn't keep up with the flow.

I picked her up one day and they said they'd had to use one bib on her front and one bib on her back to keep her clothes from getting soaked, yet they continued to say the medium flow nipples were working much better. She went back to slow flow nipples that day.

We withdrew her not long after and are now using a day home. It's much less expensive and she gets more one on one care than she did at Country Bear.

As far as the smell, I didn't smell anything at Honeytree. Country Bear had an odd smell to it, not a bad smell, just different.

I can't comment on the pediatrician, as we use Physicians To Children, and this is our first summer here, so we're just now looking into parks/pools ourselves.