In the kitchen, Anne Suballie is focused and organized. She loves to cook, loves to see people happy in the morning, but she was not above teasing children who came into Yummy Tummy's.
"I'm not going to allow no more sad faces walking in here in the morning," shouted Suballie, her voice suddenly booming across the communal room at 4110 Lawrence Ave. E.
For years, she's watched children come and go from the aging community housing high-rise and its next-door twin, 4100 Lawrence East, "hungry, cranky, sad, tired. They can't function in the morning. They can't function without a good meal."
Sabaillie, her friend Patty Wegrzyn and other women and men from their Kingston-Galloway neighbourhood volunteered their time for months to give them that meal every weekday morning.
When the club opened this week their efforts started paying off, one fruit cup and plate of waffles at a time.
Suballie, whose own children are grown, walked the distance from Kingston Road and Morningside Avenue at 5 a.m. to set up the tables. The rest of the club's crew were there by 6 a.m. Then there's nothing to do, Suballie said, "but stand back and look pretty - or ugly, whatever you want," until the children, parents and teenagers start coming in at 6:30 a.m.
About a year ago, Wegrzyn was listening to a group of women outside the buildings. They complained the breakfast club at the East Scarborough Storefront, a community resource base for Kingston-Galloway to the west, was too far for small children to go.
The club (it has since moved to St. Margaret's Public School on Galloway Road) was on a busy street and there were safety fears, Wegrzyn explained. "The parents didn't want to send them. Half the kids didn't want to walk that far anyways."
A farm-raised mother of five who rises early, Wegrzyn "jumped in with both feet."
She recruited Suballie, considered one the best cooks in the area - "the woman's got a gift for it," she said - and other people she knew. All of them took courses to be certified as food handlers, studied CPR to deal with choking and submitted to police checks.
But establishing Yummy Tummy's - "Yummy Tummy" is something Wegrzyn used to say to her granddaughter to get her to eat - was still "a chore and a half," despite approval from Toronto Community Housing and a grant through the Kingston-Galloway area's United Way-backed Action for Neighbourhood Change office.
The city's health board insisted on more sinks, another refrigerator and a freezer. Management of the buildings, Wegrzyn said, opposed the idea. Things took so long four of her volunteers dropped out.
Still, when the club was cleared to open, 53 children were registered in two days. "There was a great need for it."
For decades, 4100 Lawrence has housed West Hill's food bank, and Kingston-Galloway, one of the city's two present-day priority neighbourhoods along Kingston Road, could be a rough place.
For a while, many years ago, vandals kept sabotaging elevator controls in 4100 and 4110, trapping people inside for an hour at a time.
Things have been changing in Kingston-Galloway, said Janet Fitzsimmonds from the Storefront. People in the area used to wait for an agency to help them, but they aren't thinking that way anymore, she said. "They're saying, 'If it happens, it has to be us.'"
Wegrzyn agreed. "It's slow, but we're getting things done."
On Tuesday, just the second breakfast at Yummy Tummy's, the choice was waffles or Cheez Whiz on toast. Future menus were being planned. Wegrzyn wanted to serve eggs and bacon, but it will have to be turkey or chicken bacon, because Muslim children can't eat pork, she said.
Anna Kirton stood nearby, phoning parents to remind them the club was open and prepared to enforce Yummy Tummy's Three Strikes policy. The children must come three times a week, and are "out" if caught misbehaving three times.
This will make room for children Yummy Tummy's had to turn away.
The place will bring together parents who don't normally see each other and children who go to different schools, Kirton predicted. "Seeing the same face every day is often a good thing."
Later, June McEwan from Orton Park was wiping and folding the tablecloths. She's been the luncheon supervisor at St. Margaret's for 21 years and can call most of the children by name.
She and Wegrzyn are strong enough to heft a large wooden table or stack of chairs. Still wearing hairnets, they upended tables, kicked out leg supports and stacked them against a wall.
Apart from the hand-drawn posters, every part of Yummy Tummy's in this converted bachelor apartment must be stored away and broken out for every breakfast.
Before the room is locked, Steve Rideout returned, his toddler daughter in a stroller. He swept and mopped the floor carefully and said the club is wonderful.
"It gives the kids time to have their breakfast and make a new friend," he said.
Wegrzyn is set on fighting "tooth and nail" to keep Yummy Tummy's open, but there are problems. The club still needs more volunteers, cutlery and food donations.
A lot of people couldn't get to Yummy Tummy's, said Wegrzyn because TCH says doors must be closed for security.
"It's another battle with them that I'll have to win," she said.
For information on the club or to donate, call Fitzsimmonds at 647-347-1693, ext. 23.
- This is another in a number of stories looking at the future of Kingston Road in Scarborough.