The Garden City Telegram
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Day care provider gets ready to let go of family
Published 11/17/2008 in Features
By EMILY BEHLMANN
SUBLETTE -- In the past 30 years, Evelyn Pywell has invited more than 140 of Sublette's children into her home. She's cared for them, made crafts with them, taught them to share and watched them grow. Some have grown enough that they started sending their own children to Pywell's home for day care.
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Emily Behlmann/Telegram — Evelyn Pywell has been a day care provider for two generations of Sublette children. She's retiring after 30 years of work in day care.
Now Pywell is retiring -- a decision based more on medical advice than desire to stop working.
When she started operating her home-based day care following her youngest daughter's birth, it wasn't necessarily supposed to be a long-term career. She got licensed through the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, with the thought that she'd operate the day care until all her children were of school age.
But as her family moved from Manhattan to Sublette and she started taking on more children, she got to like it.
"I enjoy being around the kids, seeing them grow and learn," she said.
Pywell took up to 10 children at a time, usually starting with them as babies and continuing to care for them while their parents worked until the children at least were ready to start school. Even as they grew older, she continued to see them around the community, and she tries to attend their plays, ball games and other events.
They always had fun at day care, said 16-year-old Anna Messerly, who went to Pywell's house starting when she was a baby and continuing until she began school. The Sublette High School student said she and the other children, many of whom were her best friends, would make crafts, especially around the holidays, and hold events like a Christmas party and an Easter egg hunt. She said her family still has the flower pot she painted one year as a Mother's Day gift.
"It was really good," Messerly said of her experience going to Pywell's house. "You come here every day. She taught us morals and disciplined us. Even if we didn't like it, it helps us in the long run."
The discipline, and providing children with guidance as they grow up, are among the hardest tasks for a day-care provider, who might spend as much time with the children as their parents do, Pywell said.
She said some people think day care is easy -- that all a provider has to do is sit and watch kids play. Not so, she said. There's a lot more to it.
"You have the responsibility of someone else's child," she said.
The responsibility entails not just keeping the children safe, but also helping them to develop into good people with strong morals and the ability to share, plus the skills they'll need to be ready for school, she said. If they were developmentally behind, Pywell would seek help from agencies like Russell Child Development Center. Pywell said that at her day care, she told stories, played games, did puzzles and made crafts with the children, among other things.
She never missed taking them to educational programs at the library or the schools, and she always cared, said Nicole Zanghi, who said she started going to Pywell's day care when she was 3 weeks old. Until Pywell retired at the end of September, Zanghi sent her two children, ages 4 and 8, to the day care, too.
"Not only did she take care of my kids, but she took care of me, no matter how big I got," Zanghi said.
She described Pywell's role as more than just a day-care provider. She's "part of the family," Zanghi said. She said there was no question of where her children would go for day care, and that she wouldn't have started sending them to her current provider without Pywell's blessings.
"I wanted (my children) to be brought up the way I was brought up," she said. "If I had my way, my grandchildren would go to her."
Zanghi said Pywell always makes sure everyone is taken care of, even when times are tough. They were tough five years ago, when Pywell was diagnosed with breast cancer. She went into remission, but a year ago was diagnosed with colon cancer, which is part of the reason for her retirement.
Pywell said she's feeling pretty good now, but that the chemotherapy has taken its toll, and her doctor has advised her to rest more to help her regain strength. Though the retiree looks forward to moving with her husband to Colorado, ceasing day-care operations is not exactly something she wanted to do, for it means leaving the children she helped to raise.
"It's almost like they belong to you," she said. "It's hard to let them go."
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