Babysitting

           When people ask me what my job is I always tell them “I manage a small business, most of the work I do involves conflict resolution, time management, overseeing that the specified work gets done, and most importantly, making sure my charges are happy and entertained.  In other words, I am a babysitter.

            To say I was nervous the first few times I was left in a house alone with the responsibility of keeping several young children alive for two hours would be a grand understatement.  I was terrified, and reasonably so.  Other than a six hour course on safety that had been held in the basement of a church, my knowledge on small kids was limited.  I have now babysat hundreds times for many families, with little ones of all ages; however, some particular experiences I still remember.

            My third babysitting job was particularly rough.  Not that the first and second hadn’t been, but the third has always stood out.  Job number three has come to be known as “The Almost Fire.”  I was watching three young children, and I was just a kid myself, only eleven years old at the time.  As I stood at the stove and concentrated on making boxed macaroni correctly, I heard the sickening thud of somebody’s head hitting concrete.  I dropped my spoon and sprinted for the back yard, to see the middle child lying on the ground with blood pooling around his head.  I sat down next to him, pushing his hair back to see where he was bleeding from.  Luckily, it was only a small cut that I was sure would stop bleeding with some ice and a gauze pad.  Once the three siblings had stopped crying (and I had managed to get the tears out of my eyes) we walked back to the house.

            Directly into smoke.  In my haste to make sure there wasn’t a kid bleeding out in the backyard I had abandoned the macaroni. The children were immediately sent back outside to sit quietly, as I didn’t want another head injury on my hands, while I shut off the stove and ran water into the black and smoking pot.  The stench was horrendous, and the noodles were a blackened lump in the bottom of the pan.  The kids and I forewent a hot lunch of macaroni and cheese at the table for peanut butter sandwiches in the grass, while we aired out the house as best we could.  It was an interesting day, but we made it through.

            Another day of babysitting I’ve always remembered is the day that I first put a baby to bed.  The child was six months old and I was entirely convinced that this was the best baby in the world.  Unlike other babies I had worked with, she ate happily, was content to be carried around on my hip while I helped her older sibling, and loved to just be held in someone’s arms.  I made the mistake of assuming that she was going to be an easy baby.  I was wrong.  As soon as we went up to her nursery, turned the lights down, and began to rock she made the face.  The face that is the thirty second warning before a child starts to sob.  As soon as the tears began I began saying “don’t panic” although to whom I was talking to I’m not sure.  I quickly realized that I was not as great with babies as I thought I was.  I read stories, she drank a bottle, we walked around the room, I located a pacifier, I tried everything I could think of that would put a baby to sleep.  After thirty minutes of the six-month-old wailing I thought of one last thing. 

Feeling a little silly, I began singing “All the Pretty Little Horses” quietly.  As I only knew the part that is about receiving the pretty little horses I attempted to switch songs after about five minutes.  This was not okay with the baby.  For half an hour I sang the chorus to “All the Pretty Little Horses” until I was hoarse.

At nearly nine p.m. the baby’s older brother arrived in the doorway, to ask bluntly “do you know any other songs?”  I stifled my laughter, but when I looked down at the baby her eyes had drifted shut.  So I did what any babysitter would do.  I put the baby in her crib, turned on the monitor, and got out of the room as quickly as possible.

If I ever thought babysitting was going to be an easy job I found out just how wrong I was when a five-year-old boy I was babysitting darted out the front door, grabbed a scooter from the driveway, and proceeded to make a break for it down the street.  I stood in horror for a moment, staring at the runaway's sisters for a brief second before making a snap decision.  I shoved the phone into the oldest girl's hand, giving her instructions to call my mom (who lived in the next neighborhood over) and to tell her that "my brother’s gone, we need you."  Leaving a child only seven years of age standing in the middle of the front yard I put the littlest girl in the wagon and started on a nearly ten minute wild goose chase through the subdivision.  I ran barefooted down the street, dragging the wagon haphazardly behind me as I screamed the boy's name.  As my feet pounded the ground I pondered things like "why would you not have a lock on your front door?" and "maybe I should work out more often."  While I looked for a scooter abandoned in the grass the sister of the little escapee shouted threats such as "I'm telling mommy!" and "you're going to have so many time-outs for this!"  I wanted to tell her that this was probably counter-productive, but she had to be just as scared as I was so I let her continue explaining the punishments to her brother.

Finally I gave up and accepted the fact that I was not going to find this kid, and made my slow return to the house.  With my luck the oldest child would be gone to.  I was horrified by what had happened.  In one hour I had lost thirty-three percent of this family's children.  I arrived back at the house to see the missing child seated on the front steps eating a Popsicle. Simultaneously I wanted to hug the little boy and never let him go, and to make him sit in time-out for whatever time his sister's deemed appropriate for scaring me that badly.  Instead I led him inside, where my mother was sitting at the table.  I had been half expecting some sort of speech along the lines of "how could this happen" but instead all I got was a hug and a lesson on how to give a proper time-out.  Looking back it's ironic because if I'd already had a lesson on how to give a time-out then maybe I wouldn’t have ended up chasing a five-year-old through the streets only to find out he had already returned home.

 

Over the years babysitting has taught me not only a lot about children but a lot about myself.  When “The Almost Fire” occurred I went from high-strung to calm and collected, and I handled the situation well.  The time the baby screamed for half an hour gave me some much-needed patience, I got over my fears and tried something new, and it worked.  And the time that the boy ran out the door I learned how I really react in an emergency, and how far I can go to make sure that the kids are all safe.  Babysitting has taught me far more than I ever thought it would when I began years ago; I’ve learned stuff about myself and about kids and about life.  Because of my time babysitting I know I want to work with children.  It’s a job that I love and each child I've worked with has shaped me into who I have become.