On the verge of becoming an empty-nester, Megharani Thube has more kids on the way.
For the past several years Thube has provided after school childcare at her Penn Lyle Road home. She looks after the children of friends, or friends of friends, around half a dozen or so during the week. Seeing an increasing number of young couples moving into town, Thube is expanding.
Plans are underway to start an all-day daycare for up to 40 children at a new facility on Cranbury Road. It will be called Honey Bee Day School, and Thube is hoping for a fall opening if construction and permitting are on schedule.
“I really like to work with the small age group. You can really see how they are growing up, how each and every day how their personalities are changing,” Thube says. “Next year, my son is a high school senior, and then college. Now I can go off and have a chance to start a small business.”
Honey Bee is located in a residential area and it received Planning Board approval in January. The center will operate from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. for children 2.5 to 13 years old.
Megharani and her husband, Suresh, moved to Plainsboro in 1998 before settling in West Windsor in 2002. They are both originally from small villages outside Bombay, where their families worked as sugar cane farmers and dairy producers.
Suresh studied electronics engineering in Bombay and he currently works in IT. The couple have two children. Daughter Sayli works in New York as a media planner, while their son, Sahil, is currently a junior at South.
Megharani studied Marathi literature in Bombay. Marathi is the fourth most spoken language in India, and she enjoys reading literature on Shivaji, a 17th century warrior-king.
After to moving to Plainsboro from South Jersey, Thube was busy tending to her infant son and young daughter. She started watching after one of her daughter’s friends from Wicoff Elementary, and soon another after the child’s mom started working at a bank.
By the time her son reached kindergarten age, the Thubes had moved to West Windsor. Megharani tried to enroll her son at the Montessori school in Plainsboro, but there was no vacancy. She had been curious about the educational method at Montessori and enrolled in a Montessori teacher training course at Mercer County Community College. Soon afterwards, she worked at the Plainsboro Montessori for two years.
“In Montessori, the way you talk with the kids is in a positive way, you encourage and don’t discourage,” Thube said. I was curious how to get kids interested.”
When her daughter was set to enter high school, Thube left Montessori to tend to her children, and she also began overseeing children after school.
“In India you have a joint family. The grandparents watch the kids, or one of the parents is home,” Thubes says. “Nowadays both the parents are working.”
One of her after-school kids is in middle school, but Thube has been looking after her since she was a seven-month-old infant, when both parents were busy studying.
“Basically, after school the children have activities. Whenever they don’t have activities they are with me for two hours or so.”
For the upcoming Honey Bee Day Care, Thube will partner with a friend, Priya Tipnis, who also lives in West Windsor and previously worked as a paralegal.
Honey Bee will provide educational as well as arts and crafts activities. There will also be an outdoor play area. The business is still in its early stages, but Thube anticipates she will hire a several employees. She sees daycares in the area charge $1,600 to $1,800 a month for full day childcare, and her plan is to provide a value a few hundred dollars below that price point.
One of Thube’s eventual ambitions is to return to her village in India to help the poorer agricultural families, in particular to help the children without the means to attend English-language schools. The dream is to start a small school back home.
“I need more money to help them,” Thube says. “Time to start a small business and see if I can help out the community here.”
