But as one door closed, another one opened for Babington. She is preparing to join the Friendship Fun Care team starting next month, a move that helps take some of the sting out of the closure of her own facility.

To celebrate Babington’s new journey, the staff at Friendship Fun Care are hosting an open house to honour the woman who has dedicated countless hours guiding and teaching two-to five-year-old tots.

The open house, explained Friendship Fun Care owner and executive director Anny Aubin, will also serve as an opportunity for Babington’s former students to come and wish her well on her new venture.

“It’s a phenomenal opportunity to honour such a wonderful lady,” said Aubin.

Over the course of 23 years, Babington estimates she’s taught close to 1,000 kids at the Children’s Workshop Preschool, which operated out of the School Sisters of Notre Dame Mother House.

Every morning, Babington would wake up looking forward to a day filled with laugher and joy. “You laugh everyday,” she said. “It’s the only job, I think, that you can have a good laugh everyday. The children are just so funny.”

As she packed up the oodles of toys, books and arts and crafts materials collected through the years, Babington reminisced on the silly stories and heartwarming conversations that took place in her classroom.

And if the classroom wasn’t messy, she recalled, “then we weren’t having fun.” Fun was the name of the game as far as Babington’s teaching methods were concerned. She worked hard at coming up with unique and creative ways to entertain the children, all the while teaching them their ABCs and 1-2-3s.

“That was my whole philosophy, learning through play, song and stories,” she said.

Although she described the curriculum at Children’s Workshop Preschool as “pretty basic,” Babington took a special interest in teaching the children about fire safety and prevention.

Following the guidelines set out by the National Fire Protection Association’s curriculum through the Learn Not to Burn program, she bolstered the children’s knowledge of techniques such as “stop, drop and roll,” crawling low under smoke and dialing 9-1-1.

Through songs, stories, games and an array of activities, learning about fire safety was fun and rewarding, “but serious at the same time.” As the Learn Not to Burn program wrapped up in the Babington classroom, the children were ecstatic for the traditional field trip to the local fire station.

“We always did the fire department trip,” Babington said, adding that the firemen would get dressed in their fire protective gear in front of the children. “The last visit we did, they dressed me,” she laughed. “The whole idea was that I was still Ms. Babington, but I sounded funny through the mask.”

With years of curriculum details and fun activities all filed away, Babington is happy to bring her wealth of knowledge, creative juices and her file folders to Friendship Fun Care to benefit the children at the Hamilton Street North facility. In turn, Friendship Fun Care is welcoming Babington, her warmth, compassion and years of experience, with open arms.

“It’s a really good fit,” said Aubin. “She is phenomenal at bringing children out of their shell and helping them discover who they are.”

While ending her journey as owner, operator and teacher for Children’s Workshop Preschool is bittersweet, Babington explained that she looks forward to embarking on a new adventure with a fresh team.

The most rewarding factor of the job, she noted, is simple: the children. “These little people, they are like magnets.”

Although she’s had to remove her motto from the bulletin board in the classroom, the saying sings loud and clear in her heart and that’s what keeps her going.

A hundred years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car that I drove. But that the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child.

Staff at Friendship Fun Care encourage members of the community to join them in welcoming Babington to the Waterdown facility (20 Hamilton St. N.) on Saturday, October 4 from 10 a. m. until 12 (noon).