Ugh. Total nightmare. I can absolutely feel for you Anne after what we have bene through this year with my DS starting and us having to pull him out. I know the up and down emotion you are having.
We really really struggled with the decision to pull DS from his first kindergarten (which is the equivalent to preschool). We hadn't chosen it lightly, we had started looking into kindergartens 14 months in advance and talked to EVERYONE we could about our choices so that we could get "the dirt" on all of them and know the nitty gritty, the things the school does not want you to know, the gossip, the truth, etc. We had 4 visits with the kindergarten in the 12 months before DS started and it was only on the last one, about a month before he was due to start, that we got some niggles of doubt. Until then we had only heard good things and so on.
But those little concerns started out like yours...little things, things that made me question if it was ME that was the problem, if if was me having trouble letting go, if it was me overreacting, and so on. Meetings with the school where I was brushed off with things like "can we just agree to disagree and move forwards...." and so on. I kept him there because I did not want to break DS's heart. I did not want to take it from him, I wanted him to feel a part of it and settle in, me to relax about things and shrug them off....I made so many pros and cons lists and at the end of the day when the pros list was massive and the cons list not so big it didn't matter to me because the big con was "my gut and heart tell me it is not right..." and that was that. DH and I talked of it every night, non stop, day in day out and came to no decisions ever. And then one day I picked DS up and something had not sat well with me and I texted DH and said "he is never going back. my mind is made up. end of."
DH spent days trying to convince me - look at the pros! he would say. But I held my ground. I admit I was sooooo scared about what it would do to DS (I know you have seen my threads!!) but now DH has thanked me for having had the courage and smarts to go with my gut/heart.
Several people have asked us why we pulled him out and they want the dirt, the gossip, etc. And we have always held to our party line - it just did not work for our family. There are many happy families there - and we don't want to judge them and say "um, because we think that 1 teacher supervising 60+ kids on a 4 acre playground is not acceptable" etc etc....if it works for THEM it is fine, but it does not work for US. We hmmd and hawed over making noise about it, but in our case it was pointless and just doesn't work culturally for the way preschools are structured in our city; adding in that my DH sort of has to keep 'mum' about things with his role in the city. We have, however, kept no secrets to our close friends what the problems were and gossip has slowly worked itself around amongst a LOT of people. It was just the way that we needed to do things on that front.
So with Amelia's preschool I would say that there are obviously many families who really don't care what their kids are eating, or crafts they are doing, or how many snack and break times there are and so on. And to each their own. But if it is not working for YOU then go with your heart: Take her out. She will thrive more for it. It might hurt her to be taken out, it might be a struggle adjusting her to a new place again, but it won't take long before it is a distant memory.
I knwo my DS is younger and he has a very different personality, but we explained it to him in ways that were true but that also made sense in his head. He has had a lot of tears in leaving his new kindergarten at the end of each day and we have sussed that he is worried that it will be taken from him, just like his last one was. Which breaks my heart, but he is 3. He will come in time to trust that it will not disappear, that he is there for the year and that he can allow himself to love it, you know? Once he gets past those tears each day he is a different child than he was when I picked him up from his old place. And it is working for us.
If you are feeling they are liars, then to me that would be the final straw. It's not about chocolate, or nightmares, or snack time or craft time or settling in, or visitation or anything like that....it is about the fact that their attitude and beliefs don't align themselves with yours. Stay true to your family values.
