Perhaps I'll Start A Club!

[bloodyrosemccoy]

HEY YOU GUYS I TOTALLY HAVE SOME BABYSITTING MONEY SO WHO WANTS TO GO HANG OUT AT THE MALL AFTER SCHOOL TOMORROW?

 

Yes. I spent the evening wrangling an extremely amiable three-year-old.  Cripes, I haven’t done that in years. I had forgotten a few things about babysitting:

 

-Other people’s houses are always kept at a temperature somewhere below freezing. I think it’s so the babysitter will be afraid to go to sleep.

-When you’ve put the kid to bed, it’s 8:30 and it feels like 4 a.m. because everything is dark and quiet and spooky.  Not to mention cold.

-At some point during the evening, you may find yourself doing something you had never, ever pictured yourself doing, such as dancing to the Garbage Truck Song.

-I don’t know about you, but I never believed them when they said “Help yourself to anything in the fridge.”*  I still don’t, and felt really guilty when I ate a chunk of their Italian dry salami.

-When you’re three and you go to bed and Mommy isn’t there, it’s the most traumatic thing ever because what if she never comes home. You had better stall the babysitter! Yeah, you’ll go to bed once you finish playing with your toys, and get one more glass of water, and read two bedtime stories, and get measured because you’re growing taller, and watch another truck DVD, and find your blankie. After that, definitely you’ll go to bed.

 

So I put him to bed and he cried about missing his mommy and I told him I’d watch for her and she was definitely coming home, I guarantee it, and then ten minutes later I put him to bed again and said no, she wasn’t there yet but by god she was coming home and she missed him too I was sure of it, and then ten minutes after that I put him to bed again and said really, she’d be there, it was okay. Then I sat around writing in a cold, spooky house till the ungodly hour of almost ten.  It was surreal. It always has been surreal, whether you were the sitter or the sittee.

 

But dude! I got me some money! And I actually am going to the mall tomorrow, but not to meet Kimmy at the arcade and then get a burger and soda—I’m going to see if I can’t get a job there. (I has a prospect!)

 

Even so, I have the strangest feeling I got TARDIS’ed at some point.  Anybody want to check?

 

 

*Except for that one time when we** got Stewart’s Peach Soda in those people’s fridge and loved it so much we chugged it all, and they always made sure to have some when we babysat after that.

 

**My brother and I did team babysitting a few times. Nobody believed he was better with kids than I was, he hated changing diapers, and I hated going alone.

Comments

[pennyfeather.livejournal.com]

You're too old for babysitting! According to BSB guidelines, prime babysitting age is 11-13. (Because wouldn't you want a seventh-grader watching over your seven children?)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Probably because you can get away with paying a tween $2 an hour.

(Actually, the one dude who did try to stiff me wanted to weasel out of paying me fairly by saying that the money would be an advance on next time, when it was barely enough to cover this time. I told him there wouldn't BE a next time.)

Eh, I like the family and there are no kids of the right age in the area. Parents need a night out sometimes. Plus, it's money.

[kjpepper.livejournal.com]

Oh thanks for reminding me, I need to pick up the rest of the comics.

[bean-bunny.livejournal.com]

David's mother keeps her house so cold that I can't figure out how she serves drinks without them freezing first. David thinks it's fine, and always adds to the end of that, "quit calling us fat!" even if I never said anything about that.

And I remember reading in a magazine that you should always keep the fridge well-stocked to attract babysitters. :-P

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Less neurotic babysitters, I guess.

Maybe David's mother's house is cold because they have more natural insulation?

[crazykawaii.livejournal.com]

I never believed them when they said “Help yourself to anything in the fridge." ME EITHER!!! Even when it wasn't the babysitting parents, but my rugby coach who is very invested in me eating more. I’m always paranoid that whatever I pick to eat – say, zucchini – is exactly what they were planning on having for dinner the next evening, and they picked out that zucchini special from the farmer’s market to try Great Aunt Sally’s zucchini bread recipe, and they’ve been looking forward to making this zucchini bread for weeks, and they’ll both have a terrible day at work but think, It’s okay, tonight’s Great Aunt Sally’s zucchini bread night! And then they’ll come home and I ate their zucchini.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Exactly! What if it was "Help yourself to anything in the fridge except the zucchini"? Maybe they just assumed you wouldn't eat the zucchini so they didn't need to say it? I mean, you never know!

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Did you see any angel statues?

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

Wow-- I'd forgotten all that stuff about babysitting. And yeah, I usually feel guilty for eating anything -- partly because I was taking their foo, partly because I didn't think I should take the time "off" to sit down and eat, and partly because it was generally normal American food that didn't fit my mother's definition of "healthy"-- if I even knew what it was (I remember one time the mom told me she'd left "sloppy joes" for the kids and I was welcome to some too-- man, I'm glad those kids were in grade school and knew how to fix their own dinner, because I had no clue what a sloppy joe was. I wasn't brave enough to try any, either.)

I did get some wonderful food out of one babysitting job, though. Among other instances, I was hired to watch the kid one time while his mom threw a garden-party. And she insisted that I fix myself up a plate of food from the stuff that was catered in. Man, I didn't know food could taste that good! I think that's around when I started really understanding that there were serious advantages to being rich, besides just having a nice house. *sigh*