Local Daycare Centers

Now that I have (most) of the anger out of my system about the animal deaths in Ohio, I can write about a trend in town that blows my mind.  No, it's not the gypsies living in the Walmart parking lot.  No, it's not the local dealerships moving their entire car inventory to another parking lot across town as some special promotion.  NO, it's not the bizarre trend of college-aged girls wearing cut off shirts and men's baggy basketball shorts to the gym.  NO, it's not that restaurants in town (minus Applebee's!) close at 7 and aren't open on the weekends.  It's the random daycare centers that are run out of the old, run-down, split level houses in the neighborhood behind us.  As I've said before, the area of town we live in right now isn't the best.  It's not the worst-a girl I met at Bunco last week had her neighbor's house got busted because it was a meth lab.  That hasn't happened that I know of, but it's still not great.  The apartments next door are super shady and dirty.  Several people never close their windows; I'm assuming they are either broken, or, in the case of one I know, it's to let their cats go in and out.  The basement apartments in this complex are set so that they have a window that's basically at ground level from the outside, but it's probably about eye-level for them inside.  I noticed one time while Oscar was peeing on the building that one of the basement apartments had a plate sized hole cut out of their window screen.  A few days later, as we were coming around the building, I screamed in horror, seeing a severed hand coming out of the window.  Turns out, it was just a super lazy person who lives in the apartment who had cut a hole in the screen so they could just stick their hand out the window when they're smoking, rather than walk the seven feet to go outside.  I'm a little bit hoping that one of these days, when their window is open, Oscar will lift his leg just right so that he pees through the hole in the screen, into their apartment.  That's the danger of smoking. ANYWAY, the area we live in is just kind of trashy.  Behind those apartments is a "neighborhood" of 5 streets.  It's probably one of the older parts of town, because all the homes look really run-down and junky.  For some reason, on these 5 streets there are FIVE daycare centers run out of someone's home.  In no way do any of these places look like a professional day care.  They all just have signs made on posterboard that are stuck in the window, covered in finger paint with the name of the daycare.  That's another thing.  The names of all these places are really obnoxious.  They're all like "Luv N Laffs" or "Fun N Stuf" or "Kares 4 Kidz."  If you're willing to overlook the obvious lack of professional facility and proper equipment, that's your call.  But why would you want to send your child to a place that blatantly ignores the rule of grammar and spelling?!  Is that really how you want to start your child's education??  I mean, I know it's not preschool or anything, but some of the kids I see coming in and out of these houses are old enough to read, and I'd really like to believe they're questioning the taste level of whatever moron came up with "Fun Tyme Laff Town."  The icing on the cake to me is that two of these daycares are located on the same street as the residence of a REGISTERED SEX OFFENDER.  For real you guys, I looked him up, and he's a multiple offender and should NOT be around children.  I'm not sure how they are allowed to operate that close to him, or if they were already open, how was he allowed to move in there.  Either way, what parent would allow their child to go spend their days somewhere, forced to play most of the time outside because it's a HOUSE and doesn't have enough room for TWENTY children, while there is a sexual predator 5 doors down???? I'm guessing the parents are just ignorant and didn't check to see where the sex offenders live in town, but then isn't that a bit unethical for the people running the daycare to just omit that?  The whole thing gives me the creeps.  Not to mention the other wackjobs in the area.  FUN FACT: my spell check just tried to autocorrect wackjobs into Jacob.  Well played, autocorrect  Anyhoo, there's a house by one of the daycares, where a bunch of dudes live, and they're always working in their garage with all the doors open, and the garage is COVERED with nudie pictures.  NOT OKAY FOR CHILDREN'S EYES.  Then there's another house where the person living there might be Miss Havisham.  The house is basically in ruins, but the crazy old lady is obviously in denial about it.  She's got so many lawn ornaments that you basically can't see her grass.  Some things are just kinda ugly, like the fun-time frog family, that looks kind of like this:

She also has several gazing balls, some of which are held up by gnomes.  My favorite, and perhaps the one that should be most disturbing to the children in the area, is probably the one she fawns over the most.  She has a very small lawn chair, in it she has perched a baby doll that looks almost exactly like this:

She talks to it when she's out gardening, or more likely, straightening her yard trinkets, and I think she likes to position it so that it's "watching" the people in the neighborhood.  It's very bizarre, and I'm sure she's given it a name like "Janet" or "Suzanne", so that when she's at work, talking about her daughter, Janet sounds much more realistic than Gracie Angelface.  Off topic, but I was just on the Cabbage Patch Kids website (for research!) and stumbled across this little lady:

She's covered in breast cancer awareness stuff and her hair color is listed as "bald"!  I mean, I'm all for awareness, but can babies even get breast cancer?!  Why does she have to be bald, Cabbage Patch?  Not every cancer patient loses their hair.  What a morbid doll for a child, right?  I, for one, blame the Cabbage Patch.  Perhaps it's time to start using organic fertilizers and pesticides.  TAKE SOME RESPONSIBILITY, XAVIER ROBERTS!  YOU'RE NO BETTER THAN LAVENDAR MCDADE!!  Yes...I had a few CPK dolls, okay.  Most notably, my favorite, Melanie (RIP), who was special because you could crimp and curl her hair (the crimper did not work on my hair) because her hair was made out of pipe cleaners.

Years later, I devoted HOURS of my life to filling every single strand of hair with beads, making her look very...ethnic.  I now call her Kwanzaa baby, and her head weighs no less than 7 pounds.

Okay, clearly I've gone way off topic-THE POINT IS there are some legit lunatics that live in the neighborhood behind me and I am shocked at the number of daycares run out of homes.  Doesn't anyone do any research on where they're taking their child?  When the only signage for a daycare facility is half a posterboard with the name "Fun 2 Play" and a hand-drawn outline of a train, wouldn't you feel like maybe you could find something better?  One of these days, I'll try to drive by one of the houses and take a picture so you guys can see.  That's going to be tricky, though, because I really don't want them to think I'm stalking any of the children.  Although clearly they're not concerned about the sexual predator down the street, so they probably won't even care.

Not much else is happening here, I got about 25% through my last post (the animal rant), when we lost power.  It was about 10:20pm, and I looked out the windows and couldn't see any light anywhere.  It was actually pretty cool because I could see so many stars.  It was completely dark and silent, except for the quiet ticking of the clock in the kitchen, which I was waiting for Jacob to complain about.  About two minutes in, and I heard Jacob say from bed "boy, I had no idea that clock was so annoying."  So I removed the batteries and went about trying to call the power company.  That seems like it should be easy, but since we're in an apartment that's rented by Jacob's company, all the bills are in Marathon's name, so I have no clue who any of the providers are.  Thankfully I found a phonebook and there were only two power companies, so I called the first one.  The lady seemed really confused when I explained why I didn't know the name on the account and finally said "lady, I have no idea what you're talking about." Ugh.  Well why don't I just give you my address and you can send a tech out?  Twenty minutes later I got a phone call from a disgruntled technician, telling me my area of town was covered by the other power company.  Clearly he'd been sent over here to check on it and was not happy for the late night emergency call.  Whoopsie, sorry guy.  Thanks for trying!  I called the other company and had the same response from the operator when I couldn't give an account number.  I gave him my address and he confirmed there were outages in this area.  Well, duh, dude.  After about an hour of reading by flashlight, the power came back on, which was celebrated with a tired "hooray" from Jacob in the bedroom.  Unfortunately now I've gotten my second wind and I'm not sure I'll be able to fall asleep.  Sounds like I'll be having a late-night rendezvous with my book.