This collective writing project considers the central issue of how we account for, understand, and talk about, the professional work of care in early childhood education. As an international collective, we stake out some of the messiness, the specificities and complexities of care in early childhood education. Each scholar explores the issue of foregrounding care in the professional work of early childhood educators and reflects on the complexities of care in early childhood education and care. While these musing are collected together in this paper, they are each a standalone provocation to grapple with diverse issues of care in relation to etymology, policy, risk, relationships, power, and racism. As a collective, we explore ways of engaging in the messiness of care and education with a spirit of vulnerability and the courage of risk taking to unpack care in early childhood education. (author abstract)