Summer’s over.

I hope that the kids had a good one. Camps and the Cape. I’ve got plenty of photos, and I hope the kids packed away some good memories. School starts this morning, for all three of my kids. Coop will start his new pre-k class in the same school system where his sister will be a second grader and his brother a fifth grader.

Which means for the first time in nine years, we will not have kid in the daycare center my wife and I helped to found. Nine years ago, as I was finishing a year as a stay-at-home dad, my wife and I agreed that it was time for me to get back to work: that we were a two-career family by nature. We also agreed that daycare would not be such a bad thing.

As long as it was in our living room. Which is where the daycare began. We co-opted the care with colleagues, pitched in, got to know each other’s kids as well as our own. We hired Miss Alice (still there today). Eventually, we moved to a temporary facility within a stone’s throw of our house. Then to another. Miss Jody and Miss Susan joined the team eight years back and have been with us ever since.

There is not a single day that I can remember, through three kids, and over those nine years, when a child of mine expressed anything but joy about going to that center. It sounds like an exaggeration, but drop-off was always an exercise in parental humility, as my kid would show me his or her back and jet into that center. They loved to go to school. They thrived there.

And we loved it. My wife could drop in to nurse the kids when they were babies. We picked them up for lunch every day. We could be there in a moment’s notice.

But the greatest part of our daycare without a doubt: Miss Jody, Miss Alice, Miss Susan. These ladies raised my kids. They were loving, but firm; kind, creative and professional. Because of them, I never had a moment of doubt if my kids were well cared for. And my kids love them like kin.

So it’s a bittersweet first day of school. My kids all so big that none will just head down the hill to the place that has been their second home. But I may make just one more trip down there. How I can possibly thank them, I don’t know. I’ll try.