Caring occupies a contested space in early childhood teaching. Caring is valued as crucial to children's physical and emotional wellbeing but, at the same time, it is undervalued as separate from education and more difficult to measure. This article argues for reconceptualising care as complex, dynamic, problematic, political, and assembled in affective flows among human and other-than-human components. Concepts from writing of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari are used in a concept-as-method approach using a vignette from a research study of emotions in early childhood teaching. Rhizoanalysis involves mapping affective flows at the same time as tracing constraints within assemblages as means to critique and innovate from within entanglements of an early childhood setting. A cartographic approach using Deleuzian concepts of sense, paradox, and nonsense is used to explore how language expresses sense of caring beyond what can be denoted, manifested, or signified in statements by an early childhood teacher.