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Notes from Daycare
Caitlin Horrocks
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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other
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Exploration
Went on a walk to find the moon. Explored water. Explored wood chips. Explored hats. Explored musical instruments. Explored farm animals. Explored hula hoops. Explored an air mattress. Explored spatulas & Tupperware. Explored painting with yogurt. Explored rakes on the playground. Explored a bumpy gourd. Explored diggers down the road. Explored sea creatures. Explored pool noodles. Tunnel play. Played with Ms. T’s special balls. Explored a big branch with bugs inside.
Music
Sang animal songs. Sang rain songs. Sang snow songs. Sang finger songs. Sang lots of songs. Listened to symphony. Made funny noises by yelling into cups.
Health
See note about thrush on board. Rash worse. Slight fever. BM leaked, change of clothes. Bump and bruise on forehead. Wouldn’t eat lunch. Old pacifier is in diaper bag: it looked dark and moldy. Fall while walking. Bite to upper left arm. Bump to forehead: L had his shirt sleeve stuck on his arm. He came to the couch to get help then fell and hit his head on the couch. Bite on nose and cheek: L was lying in a friend’s lap while in the wagon. The friend was hugging him then leaned forward and bit L’s face.
Work
Worked on puzzles. Worked on saying “ball.” Writing experience. Read books. Read a lot of books. Practiced getting on the climber. Practiced on our new tables and chairs. Practiced walking in the hall. Worked on coloring. Worked on recognizing friends’ pictures. Practiced body parts with Mr. Potato Heads. Played with trucks & then helped put them away. Gross motor activities. Played in a wagon: climbing in & out. Fine motor activities. Dumped paint from a small cup into a bigger cup. Painted on 3 different textures. Worked on taking turns.
!
Went on a walk and saw apples and ants! Watched the dump trucks dump dirt! Went to the downtown market and saw the fish! Went on a loooong walk: very relaxing! Loved pumpkin guts! Very chatty on toy phones! Picture day! Pajama day! Crazy day! Very loud today! Smiley guy! Loved the salad! Drank first bottle from sippy cup! Hungry boy! Showed off his crawling! Dance party! Happy morning! Happy! Made it to the weekend! TGIF!!!
Nature
Rain in the courtyard of the cathedral church. Loving the chilly wind on his face. Watched the snow fall. Enjoyed the sun. Had a tornado drill. Played in the grass. Played in the snow. Went outside to feel the rain. Smelled herbs. Saw water on leaves. Collected milkweed. Collected seedpods. Played outside: new things to explore in the garden. We saw a man planting grass seeds: he planted some for us. Found the moon on our walk.
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At every afternoon daycare pickup, when my kids were in the baby room or toddler room, I would be handed a half-sheet of paper with the essentials of their day: when they napped and for how long, when their diapers were wet or dirty, and the list of foods served that day with a percentage circled for how much of each food they ate (crackers: 100%, goulash: 0%). Almost all of the information on this sheet was practical, meant to help me understand how hungry they might be at dinner, how tired (or not) at bedtime. But at the bottom were several lines left blank for “Activities.” The entries were usually very brief—the (heroic) teachers were too busy doing the activities, plus the diapers and feeding and napping, to exhaustively catalogue them. Occasionally there was nothing listed at all; most often, exactly one thing that had happened that day. Apart from incident reports explaining bumps, bruises, or bitemarks, this information was arguably inessential, but I loved the entries both for their tiny insights into my children’s days, and for the accidental poetry of the entries themselves, especially as they accumulated day after day, month after month, year after year. I kept my eldest child’s half-sheets for a long time, past any actual use for them, past when he graduated into the older classrooms where the papers stopped, the children old enough to narrate their own days. I eventually sat down with a stack of the papers, typed up many of the activity entries, sorted those into categories, and then felt able to let the papers go. Only the arrangement is mine: the words belong to the extraordinary teachers at the Grand Rapids Early Discovery Center, just one of the many, many debts my family owes them.
Thank you also to Mark Ari for originally publishing this piece in Flock and in the audio compilation EAT Flash Vol 2.
Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collections Life Among the Terranauts and This Is Not Your City, both New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selections. The Wall Street Journal named her novel The Vexations one of the Ten Best Books of 2019. Her stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, One Story, and other journals and anthologies. She lives with her family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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