Things I Have Been Told By Parents This Week

1. "It's not diarrhea, it's just really loose stool." 

(Liquid is coming out of your child's butt like a faucet.)

2. "I drove him around the neighborhood twice in the middle of the night last night to get him to go to sleep! Oh, and we don't allow him to have binkies, thanks."

(It's amazing that when he's beside himself with exhaustion, a pacifier PACIFIES HIM into falling asleep. Incredible.)

3. "Yes, he takes a bottle."

(No, he doesn't. He doesn't even know how to latch properly. We will find out. There's no point in lying to us.)

4. "He not even close to crawling. Is that normal?"

(Yes. Every child develops differently.)

5. "My son is only eating pureed foods. He's too young for solid foods."

(That's fine. But stop giving your 11 month whole corn kernels before you drop him off at daycare. We're changing those diapers and it makes us suspicious of more than just his diet.)

6. "If you get your tattoo removed you can get a job."

(Watching your precious daughter IS my job, jerk-wad)

7. "Hehe, man [my son] is staring at your shirt, and I know he's not reading the words."

(GTFO)

Abandonment Issues

I have a hard time talking about this because for whatever reason, I have a hard time admitting that I love my job. But here goes:

I have abandonment issues.

I worked with young children for over six years, and I've seen a lot of kids come and go. At one job, their third birthday is the ticket. At my other, it's the first year. Both of these milestones mean that my kids are graduating and moving on to another class or building. It might not sound like much. It probably isn't that big of a deal to 90% of the population, but for me? It's the end of another relationship I have spent the last year (or three) cultivating. Even if I've only seen the child twice a week, I've still spent over 400 hours with that child. I've invested in their development; helped them learn to crawl, comforted them after getting hurt, rocked them to sleep, etc.

While my entire life doesn't center around these little babies, a great portion of it does. If one of them gets fever on Friday, I remember it come Monday. I know which foods are in the top ten, and which toys make them smile the most. I spend hours with them every weekday, and then one day they don't show up. And then a week passes and a month and you know they're not coming back, but worse you know they wouldn't remember you even if they did.

In the Richard Curtis movie About Time, the time traveller Tim goes back in time to help a friend only to find that the woman he fell in love with doesn't know who he is in his new reality. In The Vow, a married couple gets in a car accident and when his wife wakes up, the husband discovers her amnesia covers the entirety of their relationship, leaving him feeling empty and her feeling uncomfortable. In my case, that happens every three months and is just considered a hazard of the job.

It is the worst part of my job.

Today Before Noon...

A kid handed me a regurgitated cracker (IN SEGMENTS) while his friend asked repeatedly for milk that she can't drink next to two of their friends fighting over one doll even though three perfectly fine dolls laid at their feet. So I decided to do the logical thing and blow bubbles until I passed out.

I didn't pass out, but it's the effort that counts, right? 

To All Who Enter Here, Welcome

After working in a daycare setting for almost ten years, I've decided to start a blog to document all the meaningful, absurd, and at times hilarious moments myself and my coworkers encounter everyday: from being told our opinions are invalid by parents who have spent approximately .001% of their time with their mess of a new human, to going in too close and too fast for a diaper sniff and coming up with diarrhea on our nose. We have many, many stories to occupy this space. For every morning we're handed a baby who hasn't been changed since the Nixon administration, and every fisticuffs over the shiny lego, we get to add them to our repitoire of relentless crap we get to deal with. Now you get to hear about it! Welcome to our charmed life.