stale cheetos = daycare...

so, one of the daily items of the administrating & receptioning that i do so well is picking up the mail from the mailroom. generally this is a nice opportunity for me to get out of my seat and walk around. some days it gives me a chance to practice walking in my heels (which generally results in me not-quite tripping past the elevators which just happen to randomly be loaded with people); other days it allows me to talk with the sweetie-pie mail woman whose name i still haven't found out. but on this particular day it took me back and enabled me to relive a deeply buried memory--my first daycare.

peggy & earl's.

i don't know about you, but i don't think i liked daycare. there were a bunch of sandy kids running around stealing my toys and hitting each other and hogging the swing set and picking their noses.

  

and it inevitably smelled like stale cheetos. (which is what the hallway to the mailroom smelled like today, in case you were wondering how in the world the two could be connected).

it smelled like stale cheetos because all the sandy, running, hitting, hogging, snotting children would eat stale cheetos and then touch all the toys! yuck!

and maybe once in a great while you were allowed to go swimming, but the pool would look like this so i would most likely opt not to swim until someone pushed me in... or double-dog-dared me to jump in.

and then, as if nap time weren't bad enough as a small child, i might get swatted on the bum with a fly-swatter because i had a very hard time keeping my mouth quiet.

  

am i right? isn't this daycare?

okay, maybe i didn't see things this way when i was little. maybe i loved having cheeto hands. maybe it was a little scary when mrs. peggy would come in wielding her fly swatter, but maybe she was really the nicest old lady the south ever made. and maybe earl didn't clean his pool a whole lot, but maybe i really enjoyed swimming under the hot sun with all the other sticky kids.

nevertheless, i no longer eat cheetos. i refuse to swim in dirty pools. and i am a recovering fly-swatter-hater.

thank you, hallway to the mailroom, for that fun little tumble down memory lane.