My Weirdish Childhood

In talking with a coworker about how much she has to pay for childcare in the city I had a series of strange realizations.  Before I go on though I should state that for an in-home daycare she’s paying $150 a week per child and that’s considered cheap.

So, REALIZATION NUMBER ONE: I realized that the one thing that might make me move back north when I have kids is the cost of childcare.  I say this because I know when I was a kid we had an Amish babysitter for all three of us.  And I can almost guarantee that my mom didn't spend $25,000 a year on our babysitter.     

Then I started thinking about when we were at the Amish babysitter’s house.  She used to feed us.  Like we ate meals with the whole family on several occasions.  Enough so that my sister and I formulated a hypothesis about Amish chickens laying better eggs because they somehow stayed warmer longer.  In hindsight I suspect some sort of heating plate was involved but at the time it seemed pretty stinking magical. 

And speaking of eggs, that means we were there for breakfast.  My mom always worked early but we also slept at the babysitters some nights.  I know this because I have memories of poor ADD child Kyley hating evening prayer because it was really long and all in gibberish (Dutch actually) so I just sat there waiting for it to be over.

Totally normal.  Also, those horses are giant! 

All this leads me to REALIZATION NUMBER TWO: My childhood was sort of weird.  I have memories of learning how to sit on a one legged stool, learning to milk a cow, using an engineless lawnmower, and sitting in a giant garden watching my brother eat soil.  I had dolls with no faces and took buggy rides.  I chased chickens on more than one occasion and remember being terrified the first time I collected eggs.  And perhaps best of all, all of this was often done in multi-colored shiny spandex pants with matching t-shirts. 

Honestly, I don’t even know.