Research about love in early childhood education and care is rare. Love is difficult topic to research and write about in scholarly contexts. In order to properly explore love in professional contexts, practitioner narratives on the topic were sought through individual, unstructured interviews. A spiral-patterned methodological approach was conceived of to convey the slow, recursive research process, with poetry-writing as a principle method of analysis. Other research activities took place as part of the process of making meaning, including mapping, reflective blogging, autobiographical compositions and thematic analysis. The topic of love was constructed as important in early childhood education and care. The spiral-patterned approach, with multiple methods and time to dwell on the data, was found to be helpful concept in research about affective matters.