THE ACCIDENTAL DAY CARE IN MY LIVING ROOM

When our sons' Brooklyn nursery lost its license, we figured we could host the children at home until the problem was resolved. How long could it take?

- Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Easy one morning this past May, while the house was still asleep, I tiptoed into the kitchen and was assaulted by a strange smell.

I was, by then, inured to most new odors. A month before, our sons’ day care had closed unexpectedly, and, with nowhere else to go, seven children had taken over our two-bedroom rowhouse in Brooklyn, bringing all manner of aromas with them. But this one was different. It was sharper, less ambient than the usual cast of diaper trash and yogurt pouch and chewed-up stuffie. It did not hang in the air so much as cut through it. This was an outdoor smell.

I surveyed the kitchen. The counter was clean. The garbage can was closed. The window was cracked open. Then I saw our 20-pound rescue dog sulking under the table—and came inches from stepping, barefoot, in one of several streaks of shit that spackled the floor.

King Solomon had eaten the food the children had dropped, again. It had made him incontinent, again. And in three hours, the children would be back. They would be building train tracks and towers on the floor of our sandbox-size living room, dashing madly down creaky stairs to make it to the potty station we’d set up in the basement bathroom. They would be dancing to nursery rhymes that had already lodged themselves in my head on a loop—the lullaby about the light of the moon, the colonial march about crocodiles at war on the banks of the Nile. They would, once again, be feeding the dog, committing us to yet another morning spent furiously scrubbing the floors with Clorox before anyone arrived.

I looked at the dog and at the floor and asked myself when this ordeal would end.

It all started with a push notification. On April 10, 2024, I got a message that all parents dread: I’d have to pick up my child from day care. Adi, my younger son, wasn’t sick or injured, but an inspector from the city was on-site and wouldn’t leave until all the children were gone.