The door itself was made in two parts in the old fashion of a Dutch kitchen door. In use, the upper half was always left open unless the infant screaming in the nursery became too loud for the other children in the Daycare to be able to take their naps. The bottom half was always left closed so that the infants who were allowed to play on the carpet couldn’t escape to the other areas of the Daycare center. The cutout tacked over the lintel was constructed of thin Norwegian birch plywood and depicted a large white stork with a bright yellow-orange beak and long golden legs. Gripped securely in its beak, the stork held a laughing baby cradled in a enormous white sling with the baby’s legs wagging happily on the side nearest the stork. Clearly, from the advertisement over the door, the Daycare’s nursery was a place of contentment and pleasure for the infants who were lucky enough to spend their day with the cheerful faces of the commercial aproned nannies who ran that section of the Daycare center.

Jimmy was taken to each of the nursery workers in turn and introduced as “Jimmy, Krystyn’s latest!”, before being put in a playpen temporarily while the woman returned for his diaper bag. As expected, Krystyn had signed him in and left without a word. The woman picked up Jimmy’s bag and took a self-adhesive paper label from beneath the counter, then wrote his name on the label to stick on the bag. Having placed a proper ID on the bag, she returned to the nursery and took the bottles and the jar of baby out of his bag. Once she had finished labeling the bottles of formula and jarred food, she put them in the refrigerator until they were needed. Then she placed his diaper bag on one of the shelves mounted high on the wall for storage.

One of the workers closed the upper door to the nursery temporarily so they could talk privately about Krystyn’s changeling. They crowded around his playpen and made comments to each other, saying variously, “Well, isn’t he a cutiepie?”

“Isn’t he, though?”, said another.

“I wonder what he looked like as a man? I’ll bet he was good looking! Krystyn always wants to change the good looking ones!”, said the third.

“Well,” said Gail with finality, “Whatever he looked liked before, he’s an infant now. It’s none of our business what he was before. Besides, it’s Krystyn’s spell and we can’t change it! You know the rules!”

The third woman grinned evilly and asked. “Did Krystyn leave any special instructions for him or do we treat him like all of Krystyn’s babies?”

Gail shrugged as she said, “Since she didn’t say that we should treat him any differently, then I guess we’ll just follow her standing orders. It’s up to you; he doesn’t act like the others very much, but he may be better at hiding it than the others. Unless they’re fighting the change, I don’t get much of a kick from teasing them. While I don’t have any sympathy for men, as all of you are well aware of, I do like being around babies. Otherwise, why would I work here?”

“Because Becky ordered you to…”, the third woman snickered quietly under her breath.

Gail bent deeper over the rail of the playpen and said to the diaper-clad baby boy who sat looking up at her with innocent eyes, “Poor little baby! I don’t know if you understand me, but you might as well accept what you’ve become. You’re never going to get any older. You’ll be like this for the rest of your life!”