I figured yesterday was a one-off and today’s daycare visit would be different. I talked to both the women who owned the daycare and I liked them both. The first woman said she had considered homeschooling her own children, until she found a good school, so she thought it was cool that I was doing it. She even said since Jory was six, she didn’t need to charge me the rate she charges parents with newborns and could her weekly fee in half. Wow! This woman was impressing and was within my price range, I made an appointment to come check out her facilities and said goodbye.
Her house was on the exact same street I travel down to get to San Vincente. Score! I found her house and drove slowly down her street looking for her house. I saw a house with a fence held together by some rope and dirt in the front yard. My stomach dropped. A woman waved to me from the porch and I knew that yard belonged to the house I was going into. I sat in the car for a few more minutes to finish my phone conversation with my friend, Ro, and also to give myself a chance not to be Judgy McJudgy as Whitney likes to say.
I got out the car and met the two women who own the daycare. The one, I deemed, the talker, saw me looking at the yard and explained the yard had been filled with trees and tree service companies wanted her to pay $2,000 per tree to cut each tree down, which she couldn’t afford. But a friend, in the business, agreed to charge them $1,500 to cut all the trees down, unfortunately when he was cutting one tree down, it broke through the rope and crashed into the fence. The talker felt it was a small price to pay for the money they were saving and their friend had agreed to weld the new iron pieces into the remaining fence free of charge. She also said they were planning on putting a playground in the yard now that it was treeless.
We walked into the house. It smelled fresh and looked clean. The talker out of the two began explaining that her mom ran a daycare for years where she worked and where she met her partner. Partner, as in partner partner or as in partner partner? She said her mother encouraged the two to start their own daycare. She explained her schedule, their cleaning schedule, her parenting philosophy, then all of sudden I saw the neighbor’s dog, I had seen when I got out my car, run across the porch chasing after a cat, then all this barking started.
The talker said, oh those are my Yorkies. Animals?!? Really?! I thought yesterday was a one-off, but obviously not. She went into the bedroom, stepping over the babygate and brought out to Yorkies. She held them and calmed them down, but the booming barking didn’t stop. I wondered if the neighbors were home to quiet their dog, when the talker explained that the barking I was hearing was from her Great Dane, William, who lives on the side of the house. He’s a gentle giant, but they don’t’ let him around the kids because he was 180 pounds and sort of clumsy. So what they had their own real life Clifford? Are you serious? Two Yorkies and a Great Dane. I took a deep breath and answered the talker’s questions about why I was homeschooling.
I answered her questions. We discussed what I wanted. The non-talker finally piped in and shared her thoughts. Then the talker made mention of the non-talker’s giving heart. How she took care of her bedridden aunt, how their single mom friend’s apartment had been flooded and had stayed with them from November to April, how their other single mom friend rented rooms for herself and her two kids. The non-talker’s kindness was apparent, but my goodness was this Victorian style house a half-way house or Grand Central Station? The stories continued about other ways the non-talker helped others.
As the talker was talking I was thinking, if I had met these two outside of this place we would probably be friends and the business of their lives wouldn’t seem like such a big deal, but not knowing them this place just seemed really busy to me.
We talked churches and they said they attended Agape in Culver City. Hmm, was that a church church or was that a “God is good. God is love” church where we only focus on all things positive in the Bible? The talker explained she and the non-talker became roommates, after the talker’s divorce, and that they don’t bring boyfriends or allow men friends around their daycare. Okay, one question answered.
The talker brought out her children and introduced them to me. She shared with me her morning routine and bedtime routines. I was listening intently until the non-talker distracted me with her fiddling with the window. The talker noticed and said, oh that’s just my cat. She has a cat? The talker continued. She use to be an indoor cat, but one day the screen in my bedroom fell off and the next thing I knew, she jumped up to the window and then went out of it and since then she’s been an indoor/outdoor cat. Oh happy, happy, joy, joy! And my second cat- - oh there’s another cat, this just keeps getting better. One of our moms found the kitten outside in our bushes when it was raining in June, the non-talker wanted the mom to take the kitten home. I liked this non-talker. But the mom said she already had three cats and a dog at home, so she couldn’t take it, so the talker added her, which they later discovered was a him, to their collection of animals.
So a Great Dane aka Clifford the Big Red Dog that lived on the side of the house, the two cats that lived in and out, and the two Yorkies, I so don’t understand God’s sense of humor.
Then the talker started discussing her mother and I must have had my Chi Chi face on, because she shared stuff that you just don’t share with a woman you’ve just met. She even said, I’m not sure why I’m telling you this. The non-talker nodded in agreement. Then their friend’s son knocked on the door with skateboard in hand and asked, “My mom wanted to know if we could borrow a stick of butter.” My heart melted. I was in the middle of some zany 1950s sitcom. They didn’t have a stick, but the non-talker put some butter in some tupperwear and handed it to him, along with a pan they had borrowed from his mother. The talker told me they didn’t babysit the skateboarder, but they did watch his younger siblings and when he got out of school though he would skateboard in front of their house and on their street. So, yes, you are sort of babysitting him, but you're not gotcha.
This was all a lot to take in so as the skateboarder skated away, I thought this was the perfect time to leave also. I thanked them for their time. The talker said if I wanted to try their daycare center out for a day or two for Jory, they wouldn’t charge me. I thanked her again and said I would keep it in mind as I got into my car.
Yeah, I feel like the search for the perfect babysitter is still on…
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