We had to take our daughter in to day care for the first time today. While the place we chose is a nice facility, when it’s your child you’re leaving behind even Mother Theresa is suspect. Your eye catches all kinds of things that are wrong – a small stain in the carpet simply must be blood from some horrible accident, a dingin a piece of furniture is clearly the result of some wild child running amok, and didn’t that other kid have a bit of blood lust in his eye?
You do it because you have to, and you leave the kid behind. My wife bawled, I nearly did.
So off to work, grateful for a few jerks in traffic to provide a distraction. Later Susan calls, all weepy, with the news that the day care folks called and the baby’s fine.
Much later, she calls again all weepy, after picking our daughter up. Everything’s fine. Better than fine – the women from the center got together and made our daughter Ginny a scrapbook of her first day. They took digital photos, and one of the women apparently went out on her lunch break and got them printed. It was a simple construction-paper affair, but it couldn’t have had greater effect if all the scrap-bookers in Utah had banded together. Susan, who’s also a scrap-booker, was overwhelmed and overjoyed. Here was all the proof she needed that her daughter hadn’t been neglected, and hadn’t spent the day crying in a corner, or miserable in a wet diaper.
I believe it was the act of several caring women who knew the pain my wife was feeling, and wanted her to feel better and I’m grateful for it.
It was also an act of pure marketing genius.
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