GRAND HAVEN, Mich. — Kelly LaMore has been operating a childcare facility out of her home for 29 years now, much of that time out of her home near Lake Michigan.
She believes in creating an immersive educational environment for the kids in her care, labeling the items throughout the home, hanging colorful pictures on the wall, and posting an interactive countdown to Christmas Day.
“It's changed over the years,” LaMore said of her approach.
"When I first started out, there wasn't a whole lot of training. It was very much kind of a by-the-seat-of-your-pants career choice."
While she is always evolving in regards to the space and stimuli she provides the children, she's always trying to elevate their understanding of the world around them.
“Everything is new to them, so you have to just give them all this information," she explained.
It was 2019 when she came upon a librarian's post on social media showing off a space capsule crafted out of hundreds of empty egg cartons.
“I thought, 'I could do this,'" LaMore recalled. "I just need 500 egg cartons.”
So, she got to work trying to source the used cartons, making posts in Grand Have-based Facebook pages asking for donations.
“If you just ask people, if you reach out and say, 'Look, I'm planning to do this, can anybody help me?,' I think people want to help," she explained. "They like to see people do neat things and succeed.”
She made it happen, completing her first capsule recreation at the end of 2019.
She did it again in 2020 but had to step back from the massive task for a few years.
Strategically putting together 500 egg cartons is time consuming — she estimates she put eight to ten hours of work just to actually place the cartons.
LaMore is hopeful to build another egg carton space capsule in 2023.
“If I can introduce things that I'm interested in, it's just a lot more stimulating for me, and I can make it more stimulating for the kids,” she said.
She has already collected the 500 necessary cartons for this year's build, storing them neatly in stacks and wrapped up in plastic to keep the bugs out.
LaMore plans to do the construction in a few weeks, closer to Christmas.
After that, she hopes the capsule will last at least a few days or weeks under control of the kids.
“It just kind of fires their imagination; they can look out the windows and pretend to be somewhere else,” LaMore said. "Once the tree comes down, we'll put the spaceship up."
