Intro / Background
Hello, my name is Ray Cardillo, and I represent Mother Hen's Daycare (LLC) when I'm not performing my day job (Computer Scientist). After reading through the forum, let me start by saying that I'm not trying to offend or undervalue any professional designers. We're just a small family daycare center, with big dreams, big hearts, and a tiny budget! One of the moderators suggested that I post a logo competition to this forum, so here we go...

$200 Bounty
Given that there are plenty of logo design services that I can use for anywhere from $70 (LogoLoft) to $250 (LogoJeez, LogoGuru, LogoWorks, etc), I think $200 is a reasonable bounty. To be honest with you, I'd rather spend the money sponsoring a competition like this anyway. I hope it provides an interesting design challenge, and an excuse for some friendly competition.

Rules
Experienced forum members are going to have to help me with this one. Are there a common set of accepted rules for these competitions? Hopefully this will not be a black box submission. I would like to comment (and receive comments) on each submission until we converge on something that works. I would like to keep submissions public to help spawn creativity, as long as Mother Hen's Daycare (LLC) owns the winning design.

Motivations
Mother Hen's Daycare (LLC) is a home based daycare service that cares for infants, toddlers, and school aged children (before and after school care). Our daycare has already established a great reputation in the community, but we need to build a unique identity as well. Therefore, we need an original logo that people can instantly recognize and we can register as our servicemark. We would also like it to be flexible enough to use in advertisements, business cards, t-shirts, website, etc.

Comments on our Current Logo
The current stock clipart illustration of a mother hen and her chicks can be viewed on our web site. There are things we like about it, and things we don't like about it. I'll just rant about it a bit, and hopefully you'll understand what I mean. We like the fact that it conveys a "mother hen" spirit, which seems to translate well to daycare (providing a loving and safe daycare environment, under the watchful eye of an experienced caregiver, etc). We like the fact that the illustration is not too abstract, nor too realistic, but somewhere in between. If pushed too far on the realism, you loose the abstract association to daycare and it looks like a nature scene. If pushed too far on the abstraction, we fear it will be perceived as being too comical, or not taken seriously. The problem is that the bandana looks a little dated (kinda like an aunt jamima chicken), which makes it look more like a grandmother than a mother. The chicken is just a little too portly also. We're not partial to the current color scheme, as long as it's on the conservative side of fun (whatever that means). We like the red beak because it adds to the feminine look of the chicken (kinda like lips), but something seems "off" about the size and placement of the beak. The chicks are kinda cute, but there are probably too many of them, and some are obfuscated. Again, all this info isn't to say we want a redesign of the existing logo, it's just to provide points of reference to help understand what we're looking for.

Challenges
We would like a more modern, updated logo, that avoids the "corporate look" and still conveys the "mother hen" notions mentioned above. Simple brush stroke outline style logos might be interesting if they could someone manage to capture the "mother hen" spirit. It would also be interesting to see something similar to the existing logo redesigned to address some of the concerns mentioned above. It might also be interesting to see a "cleaner" scene with the mother hen watching over a chick breaking out of their shell (infant), a standing chick (toddler), and a slightly taller chick (school aged). Actually, we have no idea what's going to work best, so feel free to be as creative as you wish. I've called this out as a challenge simply because it seems difficult to design something modern, updated, and current while still conveying that "mother hen" spirit. Hopefully someone will discover something that works.