Let me tell you a story from my childhood.

Even with a strange town like mine, I have many moments of nostalgia from my earlier years. I often fondly look back on my elementary and middle school years. Hell, anything before I was due to go off to college was a very fond memory. I remember the ice cream stand along Gifford Road, going to the playground with a bunch of my friends right after fifth grade ended, and the celebration we had at the end of seventh grade where our homeroom of almost twenty people played dodgeball on the soccer field.

God how I wish I could go back to those simpler days.

Wouldn’t you want to return to those days where you didn’t have to worry about insurance, car payments, taxes, rent, or any other bullshit? I’d love to be stuck in a Groundhog Day-style loop where all I do is relive one of the summer days where I would hang out with Toby and his siblings at the beach or one of the days Gavin DeMurs and I would walk from his house to the McDonald’s and just people watch.

This is one of the few stories from my childhood that I do not recollect all that often. When I do, it sure as hell isn’t out of fondness.

Let me tell you about Sunny Friends Daycare.

My father didn’t retire until two years ago, and he worked many years at an architecture firm in the nearby city. His days were long and mostly uneventful, but he made some insane money off of his job. My mother was a special education teacher at the local middle school until she got a much better job offer to work in the financial aid office at a large university about an hour or so away. The only catch was that she’d be working basically all year round, and she’d have to go to the office on campus.

This was back in the summer between fifth and sixth grade, so I wasn’t really old enough to be taking care of myself home alone for about nine hours a day. Both of my parents realized this, and that’s when they reached out to Sunny Friends Daycare.