Rule Four // c.h

Daycare Shenanigans

"Maria, I don't know how you do it." I say, surveying the room. I love kids and I love Carter but taking care of twenty unruly kids in various toddler years.. That was insane. Currently, only about eight of them were at the day care at the moment and even they were too much to handle.

Percy was currently scribbling on the walls with blue crayon. Leo and Nico were fighting over a toy dump truck and looked like they were on the verge of throwing punches. Piper and Rachel were having a very loud, very obnoxious singing contest and I couldn't tell who was winning. Jason was running around the room, flying a toy airplane around and making loud sound effects for it and every now and then he would bump into something and knock it over. That just left Maria's own daughter Hazel and my son Carter who were giggling on the floor, playing with a puzzle together.

"Oh this? This is a calm morning for me." Maria says, gesturing around the room. "What would really suck right now is if J.J started crying in the nursery. Then I'd be fucked because he takes forever to calm down." I laughed a little. J.J was her youngest son and he looked very much like his father Daniel, dark skin and curly hair. He was an adorable one year old.

"Should you really be saying that word around these kids?" I asked her. Maria shrugged.

"They're not paying attention." Which was true of course.

"Well I have to go soon but I wanted to tell you to stop buying my son gifts. You wouldn't want to upset the other kids would you? And Carter is spoiled enough as it is." Maria rolled her eyes at me good naturedly.

"That's why you're supposed to have another kid Lil'. It'll knock Carter's ego down by several notches once he realizes that the world and his parents don't revolve around him."

"You're in the child care business. You shouldn't talk like that." I said with a laugh.

"It's exactly because I'm in the child business that I can say that." Maria corrected. "I took tons of child psychology classes. I think I know my shit Lily." I shook my head at her before the two of us hugged.

"All I'm saying is, you already let my son go here for free, you shouldn't feel obligated to buy him gifts."

"Um, yes I do. I'm trying to beat Jackie as the best fricken Aunt ever. I swear to god that girl would buy this boy the damn moon without blinking an eye." She had a point there.

"It's not a competition." I replied, rolling my eyes before walking over to our children. "Hey bud, come say goodbye to momma." Carter jumped up immediately and ran over to hug my leg quickly before letting go just as fast.

"Bye momma!" He cried out, flopping back down onto the floor with Hazel who giggled. She was pushing her curly hair out of her face and gesturing to the puzzle pieces with vigor, asking him which one they should put into the picture next.

"I swear, they're going to get married one day." Maria said with a contented sigh. I wrinkled my nose at her.

"They're children Maria, don't put all of that on them right now."

"I know, it'd just be really cool if the two of us were mother-in-laws?" She said, her voice rising higher at the end. "No... What's the word for a relationship between the mother of the groom and mother of the bride?" She asked me. I thought about it for a second and shrugged.

"I don't know the English equivalent but I think there's a word for it in Spanish." She shrugged.

"We're both Hispanic and neither of us know it." We laughed before I finally said goodbye to her and began to head to work.

Today I was assigned the task of upkeep, making sure a lot of the artifacts in the storage area of the museum are in pristine condition and cleaning them up a little if they needed some tender loving care. It's a tedious job to some of the staff here at the Natural History Museum but I loved it. I get to see pieces of history that nobody else could! I get to preserve them for future generations and that's why I love my job. There's always going to be history, especially natural history and that meant that I was always going to have a job.