Today I was faced with this essay question:

We are committed to building and sustaining a diverse population. How would your family contribute to this goal?

I was not faced with answering this question because I am applying to financial aid at Harvard, or for my one child permit in China, this was the application at the local day care. They even were kind enough to suggest, "attach additional pages if necessary." Additional pages!?

I've heard a hundred times that it is tough to get kids into day care nowadays, but this is an application for Sept of 2007. This is like a college admissions test or something, are you kidding me? And personally I think asking for the IQ test at two years is stepping over the line (just kidding -- I think).

We also have a scheduled "tour" of the facility (read: secret test of the parents). What's a good question to ask a friggin' day care facility? "Umm - looks like your doing a great job keeping the snot off the walls. We were looking for a less-snotted facility, and this might be it."

And of course I'm sure at some point they'll have him come by and play with the other children so they can OBSERVE him (man that sounds ominous). It will take all of 30 seconds before they find what I consider his adorable trait of trying to conduct classes (e.g. when the teacher says its time to put the blanket back in the bag he sprints to the bag and yells "BAGBAGBAGBAG" at everyone until the blanket is properly put away).

While I see this as a nice sign of leadership abilities, this will no doubt be viewed as a dictatorial trend unbecoming of their free-loving commune of a Cambridge day-care facility.

I know you say they probably don't care that much.. but I'm telling you, these kids get tagged quick. This morning at a two-year olds birthday party we overhead chatter about another family that went like this. "We like his parents, but we didn't want to invite the biter because it would have ruined the whole party." Does his mom know he's called that? I also heard about the pincher and the pusher today. What is this, Dick Tracy mafia-tots?

Perhaps I could opt out of this whole high stakes game of day care, you say? Buck the trend and all, what could happen?

Simple, we don't get the convenient day care up the street. Instead, we get some ridiculous out of the way daycare in Boondocks, MA so that Start-up Mom gets totally stressed fighting traffic on her five hour commute to day care every morning. She's stressed out, so Kaden gets stressed, which causes him to lose his unbelievably amazing trait of quietly going to sleep (sometimes ASKING to go to sleep) at night.

Instead all this horrid bad-daycare induced stress will cause him to scream and cry incessantly at night, and so his parents will be too tired to be good parents and he will never get into the grad school of his choice and therefore will turn into a supervillain bent on the destruction of the universe (there's a dictatorial trait for you).

Anyway, as you could imagine when faced with this prospect, I wrote one hell of a tear-jerker about my family's emigration from Palestine and a roaring tribute to the benefits of exposure to international basketball students.