Kevin Simpson | The Colorado Sun
While Kayla Buchanan sits at her desk at the Country Living Learning Center, her husband, Cheyenne County Sheriff Michael Buchanan, slips in the front door a little before noon and heads down a hallway to a small kitchen.
There, dressed in full uniform for his department’s afternoon firearms qualification exercises, he hovers over the oven preparing pizza for a dozen hungry kids. At the day care operation Kayla opened last September, the job of serving Colorado families on the Eastern Plains from Kit Carson all the way into western Kansas sometimes becomes a family affair.
“He’s my lunch lady today,” she laughs.
The 34-year-old mother of four embodies the requisite resourcefulness of moms and dads struggling to make parenthood mesh with increasingly difficult economic realities. Her decision to open the doors to Country Living, a nonprofit center in the midst of a rural day care desert, seems more like the inevitable result of a personal evolution — from desperate parent to helpful neighbor to determined problem solver.