SLUG: B04_daycare_covered
SET: B
CONCEPT: The first deposit covered daycare for the whole month
HEADLINE: Watch the setup video
WORDS: 624

The first Friday it landed and it covered the entire month of daycare in one line.

$412.

That is what this young mom pays per week for two little ones at the daycare off the highway in a suburb outside Charlotte.

Two kids.

One infant, one three year old.

She had been quietly moving the three year old to a cheaper schedule where he only went Thursday and Friday to save a couple hundred bucks a month.

Told nobody.

Not her husband, not her mama, not the ladies at church.

Just a spreadsheet on her phone she kept opening and closing at red lights.

I met her at the mailbox line at the little post office on a Wednesday afternoon.

She was holding an envelope she did not want to open and I could see her hands shaking.

I said honey are you okay and she said not really.

We ended up sitting on the bench out front for about forty minutes.

She told me about the Thursday Friday schedule and how she had told the daycare her mama was watching him the other days.

Her mama has been gone since 2019.

She said she had not cried in front of anybody in eleven months and she was not going to start in a post office parking lot.

Then she did anyway.

I sat there with her.

I did not say a word for a long time because there was nothing worth saying.

Then I pulled my phone out and showed her a short setup video I had watched back in February.

The one my brother's wife had shown me at a baby shower in a folding chair while everyone else was doing the diaper cake.

I told her the whole thing runs off the house wifi and it takes about twenty minutes to set up on a Sunday.

Little device.

Sits on the kitchen counter next to the coffee pot.

I told her the first Friday one landed it was $1,850 and I sat at the kitchen table and cried the same way she was crying now.

Because I had spent the whole spring adding up the ortho bill and the car tag and the water heater on a calculator I keep in the junk drawer.

Then a number showed up in my phone that made every single one of those columns quiet down at the same time.

The next Friday was $1,648.

The one after that I had a stomach bug and forgot to check for two days and it was still sitting there when I did.

I told her all of this on the bench.

She set the phone thing up that Sunday after church.

Three weeks later she sent me a photo.

$412.

Same number as one whole week of daycare, sitting in her phone at 6:12 in the morning while the coffee pot was still filling up.

She put the caption underneath.

The three year old is back on the full week.

That was it.

That was the whole message.

I sat on the edge of my bed and read it twice and then I read it out loud to the empty room because there was nobody else awake.

If you are the mama sitting in a car right now doing math on a receipt.

Or moving one of the babies to a shorter week because you cannot see any other way to make July work.

Tap the button under this post and watch the setup video.

Same one my brother's wife showed me at that baby shower.

Same one I showed the young mom at the post office.

The whole thing runs off the wifi and about twenty minutes of setup one morning.

Make sure you let people know, if they have a phone and wifi they can do it too.
