“Saturday morning, when I’m on duty, I always volunteer to cook breakfast. There’s a perscribed menu for meals, but all the cottages are stocked with good spice cabinets, and if I happen to have leftover ingredients from other meals, I try to do something special. As staff, we spend so much time teaching and curbing and interfering, sometimes I think we forget to be creative when showing how much we love and care about the kids. So I do this breakfast thing, something small, something they’ll smile about when they wake up, and remember all the way to bedtime. This week, I made apple cinnamon pancakes, with plenty of vanilla and nutmeg and fresh apples. I got the griddle at just the right heat for perfectly round golden cakes and cooked up a huge batch, trying to make the whole cottage smell good. One of my co-workers sat outside a child’s door and plucked out a tune on his guitar, motivating the kid through room-cleaning. I made up a song to his tune, about how my dad always makes pancakes on Saturday. I stopped in the middle when I felt the tears coming. I don’t even like pancakes as much as other breakfasts, but my dad’s pancakes are the biggest sign that everything in the world is Okay. And I know that no amount of cinnamon-flavored mornings are going to reassure these kids that everything is really Okay, but, my co-worker reminds me – we do what we do. Whether it’s guitar, or fixing bicycles or making up special nicknames and handshakes or even just the occasional pancake breakfast, we do whatever we can. And maybe, someday, we will be a piece of their story of how everything eventually became Okay.”