Glad It Didn't Leave Scars

Before I was a mom, I was a babysitter. You'd think that years of babysitting would have taught me to avoid the children route, especially when you consider some of the experiences I had while tending to other people's offspring.

(And you know what? I'm actually glad that I wasn't permanently damaged by those babysitting experiences because I actually really like my kids. They're so much better than other people's.)

The following is a story of the worst babysitting job I ever had. It is a re-post of a story I told on my personal blog a year ago, with a few touch-ups. Feel free to skip it if you've read it already. If not, you are not allowed to skip, but must keep reading. Sorry.

(Here is where you should imagine fuzzy, wavy lines transporting you back in time to a period of my very enthralling history.)

I was about 13 years old when I would frequently babysit for some friends of my parents, Trent and Sheryl. They had two very well behaved children; Miles was around four or five years old, and I believe Amanda was two.

Trent was in dental school at the time, so to help out with finances his family lived above a mortuary. If a call came during the night to retrieve a body, he would go and collect it. I'm not sure if he got paid to do this, or if their rent was free as long as they performed their corpse taxi duties, but can you imagine a more exciting job? I can't.

Anyway, they lived there above the morgue as though it were a perfectly normal thing to do, and hosted some killer Halloween parties, because that would be the main perk of such accommodations, don't you think?

Sheryl did take me downstairs once to show me a body that was being kept in "the fridge". I have always had a kind of morbid fascination with cemeteries and morgues, and at the same time a paralyzing fear of dead people, so that was a bit of a wicked treat for me.

One afternoon I was babysitting Miles and Amanda, and I knew it would be quite late before Trent and Sheryl came home, so I had settled in to play games, watch movies and do whatever else the kiddos required for entertainment.

Around four-thirty in the afternoon I was playing Hi-Ho Cherry-O with my charges and was interrupted by the sound of a door opening at the bottom of the stairs that led to the morgue. I froze, stiff as one of the poor souls in the basement. My pulse was racing as I listened intently for the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs, or moaning escaping the lips of someone who was presumed dead but awoke, all the contrary, in cold storage and was seeking aid.

Eventually I decided that I would not be able to breathe until I made sure that we were not about to be joined by a reanimated being. I approached the ominous door which separated the living and the dead, and reached out for the knob. I waited there for a while to make sure I really was prepared to die; I wasn't, but I was left with no choice but to turn the knob, because I was turning blue in the face from lack of oxygen. I opened the door a crack and peeked down to the bottom landing. There was no one there. There was, however, I neat stack of mail sitting on the third step.

Good grief, people! If ever you live upstairs from a pit-stop for the dead, you may want to warn your babysitter that the postman might open the door that serves as barrier between embalming fluid and peach scented potpourri. Otherwise, your sitter might have a heart attack and join the folks downstairs, and then who's looking after your kids, huh?

Quickly recovering from that episode, I then cooked and fed the kids Spaghettios for dinner, got them bathed, and read them a story before bed. Then it was lights out for them, and I did the dishes and then plopped on the couch to watch TV and fall asleep.

At one-thirty in the morning, I awoke to the sound of retching coming from the kids' bedroom. I was up and in there quicker than lightening, and poor Miles, who was notorious for his over-active gag reflex, was in the process of throwing up all those Spaghettios he had eaten for dinner.

Now here's another tip for all you parents and babysitters out there: If you have a child who is prone to throwing up, do not let him sleep on the top bunk. Miles had leaned over the edge of his bed before ejecting his dinner, and poor, sweet Amanda was crying on the bottom bunk, completely covered in circle-shaped pasta vomit. I have been a mother for nine years now, and I have yet to encounter a mess that rivals the middle of the night vomit-fest that Miles treated me to.

But what they say is true - it's easier to clean up all kinds of bodily fluids if they come from your own flesh and blood. Still - after that night I think it a wonder that I agreed to have children at all.


Inspired by:

Softly Passing Judgement Because I Can't Help Myself

While I wrestle with myself over whether or not to write a post about something I am passionate about, but fear I cannot voice without being controversial and offensive, I leave you with this slightly less controversial thought:

Some kids don't even know how to just play anymore. Some kids have no imagination.



I wonder why that is?...

Not Yo' Mamma's Field Day

Remember when you were a kid and school was almost out and you were forced to stand out in a field in the dusty heat of early summer and run three-legged races and participate in jumping contests?

I remember.

I hated field day with all of my heart. Just another opportunity to feel like a fool and get sweaty. And when it was all over, I got to take home a blue ribbon that stated I was a phenomenal participant. Loser, in other words.

Well, gone are the days of races and ball tosses. Or at least for my kids. Nowadays Field Day means giant inflated obstacle courses, bounce houses, ice blocking, slides, and in the afternoon - a fire truck will come and cool them all down. I think I even saw a snow cone stand, but that could have been my imagination.







Do your kids have Carnival/Field Day, too, or are mine some of the lucky few?

Sports, Parenting and Rage

Cameron's baseball team has had, I think, three games and several practices. They have had a player on base only two times, never scored a run, and they walk about a dozen batters from the other team every time they play defense.

It's the first year that the kids are doing the pitching, and it's been a painful experience.

All of the pitchers that have pitched to our kids are throwing the ball so fast that our kids can't connect to save their lives, and yet, when we pitch, we're lucky to get it in the strike zone and when it does the ball is going so slow that it barely makes it to the plate and it's a cinch to hit.

It's been very, very ugly.

I am not one of those moms who signs her kids up for sports to groom them for their college days and Andrew, believe it or not, is certainly not the kind of dad who pushes his kid to train and practice their sport every spare moment they have and yells criticism from the sidelines. We put our kids in sports if they express a desire to play and to learn skills and have fun. We have no grand assumptions or requirements that they use these experiences to secure a scholarship down the road.

But no kid likes to lose. It's much more fun to win, or at least to score.

And I think that everyone on Cameron's team is getting discouraged. But that's no excuse for the behavior of one kid on our team.

We happen to have a kid on our team who thinks he is the star, and while he probably is one of the best players on the team, he is certainly nothing to get excited about. He gets excited enough about himself without help from anyone else.

So this kid decides last night that because he is the self-proclaimed star of the team, he has the right to coach the other players. He tells them where they should be standing, how they should be standing, when it's their turn to bat, how to swing when they are on deck - the whole bit. By the time the first inning was half over, I was ready to knock him up side the head. And where was his mother? In the bleachers, completely aware of what he was doing and saying nothing.

So obnoxious was this child that I was standing at the sidelines plotting evil things to say to him, but deciding that I would be satisfied if he just struck out. (Yes, I was wishing for a kid on our team to fail, but trust me, he needed a little humbling.) I got my wish. He stood there at home plate waiting for the perfect pitch and consequently struck out by failing to swing at three perfectly acceptable pitches. Arrogant little punk.

So what does Star Player do? He uses his bat to beat the heck out of the dugout wall and points his finger at the pitcher and yells about how the pitches were not in the strike zone. (They absolutely were.)

What kind of parent raises a child to feel such disappointment at failure, to blame it on someone else, and to act in such a violently inappropriate way? His mother hollered from the bleachers that it was OK!

No, it was not OK.

She should have walked her rear-end over there and explained to her kid that while it was alright to be disappointed, it was not alright to take out his frustrations on the city's property, nor was it OK to be such a poor sport.

Perhaps her jeans with the fashionable holes much too close to her bikini line were too tight to allow her to walk at all.

So on we went with the rest of the game/massacre, and it was our turn to play in the field. We had a poor little pitcher who was trying his hardest to throw the ball into the catcher's mitt, but it was all over the place and often never made it all the way to the plate. He walked five players before he started to cry. Our coach went out and gave him a pep talk, told him not to give up, and let him continue pitching.

And that's when a kid on the other team started heckling our pitcher. He was standing on second base, right behind the pitcher's mound. He was on second base because our pitcher had thrown him four balls. Not because he had hit the ball, so he really had nothing to feel superior about - but that didn't stop him.

"Throw another ball, we could use some more runs!" He was yelling. "Just throw another crappy pitch and let's get on with it!" And they just kept coming.

I was scanning the opposite bleachers, looking for the despicable parent of this jerk of a kid who was taunting our already crying nine-year-old pitcher. Not one adult said anything to this kid. I was disgusted.

I figure there are three possibilities as to why this kid's parents did nothing about their child's behavior.

A) They weren't there. (Shame on them.)

B) They saw nothing wrong with his behavior. (Shame on them again.)

or C) They didn't want to embarrass their kid or themselves by taking any sort of discipline action in front of the crowd. (So it's ok for their kid to humiliate another player, but not for them or their child to suffer any embarrassment? Right.)

If Cameron had done something like that, I would have yanked his ass out of that game, dragging him off the base by the ear for everyone to see, and he would not have gone back in, even if it were going to cost his team a win. No kid of mine is going to belittle another child, especially one who is already perfectly aware of his own shortcomings.

My blood was boiling.

Of course, our turn to bat came around once again, and this same horrible kid with idiot parents was covering third base. Our kids had no chance at hitting a ball thrown by their pitcher, but this kid just couldn't stop himself from taunting the batters anyhow.

"Swing and miss! Swing at everything! You're going to miss it!" And he waited to shout all this crap until the pitcher had just released the ball, in hopes that the shouts would startle the batter and make him lose his focus.

It was so bad that I could actually see myself rushing the field and slapping this kid across the face and not feeling out of line at all. I probably would have received applause from every intelligent person at the park. These are nine-year-old kids. Maybe taunting and heckling is acceptable behavior for a high school game, but this is little league. We were loosing by something like ten runs; we hadn't even scored.

Andrew got agitated enough to yell, "Hey, third base! How about you shut your mouth!"

If you think that stopped him, you're wrong.

Can you just imagine what kind of parents this kid has? Think about it. What kind of lessons are they teaching that mongrel?

Our teams are facing off again on the 27th of May, and you can bet your life that I will not sit idly again. If we have to listen to this kid harass our children, then he can listen to me telling him exactly what I think of him and his baseball skills.

I need a Valium.

Young Love Makes Me Sick

I understand that kids are into style and being cool at a much earlier age than they were when I was young, but I was floored at what happened with my almost nine year old yesterday.

Cameron walked in the front door after school and announced that he had invited two friends to his birthday party on Saturday and that they could both come.

I about shot through the roof, because this wasn't the first time that Cameron had invited kids to a party without me telling him that he could have a party. We only let our kids have parties every other birthday because they are just so stinking expensive, and honestly, it takes me two years to get over the trauma of a birthday party, so there you go.

I told Cam that he would have to call those two friends and tell them that he was not having a party. He was really good about it - didn't cry or scream or threaten to run away or even tell me that he hated me. He just picked up the phone and called Megan.

M-E-G-A-N. As in a girl.

And that wasn't a complete shocker, because he had two girls at his party last year when there were several kids in attendance. I was just surprised that he had invited only two people to his impromptu party and that a girl had made the cut.

So he told Megan that there was no party, they had the whole discussion about what to do with his present that she had already bought for him, (cringe), and then he said goodbye, waited a minute and began giggling like a maniac. The next words I heard from his mouth were, "No, you hang up first."

Oh, no he didn't!

And then the giggling again, followed by another, "No, you hang up first!"

He did.

Are we really going to do this already? You hang up, no you hang up? I have never even done that! (I don't think.) I couldn't decide if I was more amused or nauseous.

I am so glad that I didn't let him go ahead with this party thing because he had intended it to be an outing to a movie theater. I can't imagine what would have gone on in the dark. I bet he would've pulled the move where he'd yawn and end up with his arm around Megan.

This is all happening too fast.

What's In A Name?

Cameron came into the kitchen yesterday and said to me, "Drew is playing with his garbage."

"Whaaat?", I said.

"Drew. Is. Playing. With. His. Garbage.", Cameron said as though I were a small child who wasn't getting it. I wasn't.

"What garbage is he playing in?"

"You know," Cameron said, "his privates?"

"Oh, you mean his junk?"

"Yeah."

I guess I should clarify that Drew is two and was in the bathtub. What two-year-old boy doesn't explore the floaties in the tub?

My concern was over the term Cameron used. We don't beat around the bush here - we call a penis a penis, and having no little girls, we've never had to use the word vagina. But there have been a few times when I was changing Trent's diaper and told him to quit grabbing his junk, (because Trent's favorite thing to do is anything that he knows is bad, and he knows it's bad to grab his poo-covered goods while I'm trying to wipe his bum). So I guess the "junk" term came from me.

We are a crass generation, are we not?

So what words do you use with your kids? Do you teach them anatomically correct terms or do you use other names for their "junk"?

In Case Of Emergency, Dial All Of Your Relatives.

This one is going to be a rant because there is no other way around it. And sometimes that's what a blog needs to be - a place for me to vent my frustrations so that I don't do anything I'd later regret.

About a year and a half ago, I got a call from my son at school. Mr. Drama Queen. He calmly told me that he might have broken his arm at recess. Well, oh, my hell! Why was he the one calling me instead of a school administrator? I grabbed my keys and hit the road to rescue my kid. I got there and the school office is buzzing with activity, but none of it is over my son. The secretaries are all answering the phones and making chit-chat with other moms and teachers in the office, and my son with the possibly broken arm is sitting in a chair by himself with his arm cradled in his good hand.

Long story short - he was fine. Not a thing wrong with him. He bumped his arm a little and was sent to the office, likely because of the amount of fuss he was making. But let me tell you this - I was livid that those secretaries allowed him to call me and tell me that he might have a broken bone. Perhaps if anyone had been paying attention when he called or if they were using the space inside their heads for things besides storage of dirty gossip information, they may have caught on to the fact that my kid nearly gave me a heart attack.

Let's fast forward about three months to the next phone call from Cameron. He was really, really sick this time and needed to come home. Really and truly! I promise, Mom! Well, okay, I'll just wake up the two babies from their naps, load them plus Drew into the wagon and drag it up a snow covered hill for a half mile to come get him. Of course, as soon as I got Cameron home he was magically healed.

The next time Cameron called I was smart enough to make him let me speak to a secretary. I asked her about his condition and she confirmed that he was coughing pretty badly and should probably be picked up. So up the hill through the snow we went to get Cameron, who gave a total of one hacking cough during the remainder of the day. Starting to feel like those secretaries just don't want my kid in school. So I kept him home for two more days, just to be sure that he wasn't going to infect any of the other students with Nothing Disease. I place fair blame on Cameron for faking, but some of the blame should go on the women working in the office who should know when to actually think about and properly react to what's happening right in front of them.

Not long after that, Cameron called home again and was near death for the third time. I asked to speak to a secretary again and told her that our new rules were that Cameron either had to have a fever or had to have thrown up in front of at least one witness if he wanted to come home. Lacking that necessary testimony, I asked her if she had a thermometer to take his temperature with. She replied that, yes, they did and proceeded to check him and find that he was within normal range. Back to class he went.

What the heck happened to school nurses? Where are the sick rooms where you could lay down on a cot covered with crinkly paper until you felt better? I have a great idea! - Lets just let the kids call their parents once a week with symptoms of a major disease or life threatening injury! It'll do wonders for their education!

Today was the best though. This time it was gold medal at the Olympics, first prize at the county fair, promotion at work with accompanying ten percent raise kind of stuff. This one is the winner.

We all remember Cameron's head injury from last week, right? The one that bled a lot but stopped with a little pressure and did not need stitches or prayers or anything like that? Well, apparently some girl in his class, who obviously does not have brothers, hollered that Cameron's head was bleeding, so the teacher sent him to the office to get it taken care of.

You know what the office does? They call me, (I was vacuuming my car and did not hear my phone), they called Andrew, (also vacuuming), they called my mother, (no answer), they called my grandfather, my father, my sister, and finally, my aunt, bless her heart. She immediately jumped in her truck and drove fifteen miles to pick up my son from school. Meanwhile, I check my phone and see that I have two missed calls from the school and so I call them right back. The woman on the other end of the line tells me that Cameron's head is bleeding and someone ought to come look at it, but Aunt Lisa is already on her way to get him.

Let's all take a deep breath here. It's a little cut. He probably picked or scratched at the scab and made it bleed a little. No big deal. But now Aunt Lisa is on her way, so I have to come intervene. I met Lisa in the parking lot and we chatted for a while, because I'm fully aware that there is not an emergency issue going on inside, and then she went home and I went in to tell the office personnel where to stick it.

Inside the office, I find Cameron sitting on that same chair that he sat in with his not-even-close-to-being-broken arm all those months ago, and this time, with no bleeding head. Maybe it did bleed for a second earlier, but he's not even holding a tissue or anything with which to stem the flow, so it can't have been that bad. And again, no one is paying any attention to the kid with the supposed head injury. I guess that in our day and age with law suits over anything and everything, they are required to play it safe and call me, but we're talking about a picked scab here.

I choked back all the swear words that were crawling up my throat and asked if they had any first-aid supplies. Of course they did! (They why in the name of Florence Nightingale didn't they put them to use??) Any gauze? "Of course! Let me just find it.... Nope, probably not in this box labeled "Sterile Gauze Pads", it must be something else..." I had to explain to this secretary how to read a box label and what gauze was. I bandaged his not bleeding head myself and sent him back to class. Completely infuriated that they would call everyone in the valley who shared some of my DNA to come to the aid of my perfectly healthy and well child, I decided that it was not the moment to confront their stupidity and walked out of the office taking deep, calming breaths.

These are the people responsible for the care and education of my children. But not for long.

End rant.

A LITTLE NONSENSE NOW AND THEN IS RELISHED BY THE WISEST MEN

I can admit that I have an addiction.  I can't seem to go a day without a soda.  Or two.  It's my happy juice, and I'm ok with that because my bowels are regular now.  Water has it's place, too.  I won't tell you what that place is, because even though I've come a long way in that department, some of you would still be shocked.  And yey for you.

Soda is not cheap.  Cheaper than beer or therapy though, so we're still justified, but we only buy it when it's on sale.  So tonight I stumbled upon a 4/$13 sale at Walgreens, but they seemed to have something against Diet Mt. Dew.  So do I, as a matter of fact, so I understood, but if I don't keep my man in twelve packs he goes to the convenience store that sits a stone's throw from his office and buys the more expensive liter bottles of the stuff.  Therefore, I decided we needed to try another Walgreens.  The next one we hit did in fact have the twelve packs of Diet Mt. Dew, so I loaded four of them into my cart.  At the checkout stand I noticed a display of Wonka Bars.  Chocolate Waterfall bars, to be exact.  They were wrapped in the most fantastical shiny wrappers, and even teased that each bar held the possibility of containing the coveted Golden Ticket.  

Well, how could I not, right?  I added a Wonka Bar to my cart.

Back in the car, I gave the bar to Cameron and Ethan and told them that it was a Wonka Bar and that they needed to open it together to see if they would become the bearers of one of the most magical items in the history of the world.  If you could have seen their faces you would remember for yourself the joy of being a child - when possibility is huge and it makes your stomach flip.

We did not get a Golden Ticket, but that was some darn good chocolate.  We each broke a piece off and shared it - just like Charlie did with Grandpa Joe.  

We decided to hit up one more Walgreens to utilize the register coupon we had gotten from our Mt. Dew purchase and get another four twelve packs for ten dollars this time.  At the end of that purchase, the register spit out another three dollar off coupon, and I told Andrew that we'd have to come back tomorrow and use it before we forgot about it.  We considered stocking up on even more soda, (or liquid death if you will), but the sound of giggling in the backseat made me think, "What would Charlie do?"

I think we'll be enjoying some free Wonka Bars tomorrow.

Dealing with the What-Ifs

On my list of things to do this week is to get some paperwork from our life insurance company and make some changes. We have no beneficiary listed in the event that Andrew and I both die at the same time. The wise thing to do would be to follow that up with getting a will done.

And that leads me into the following question:

How do you decide who your children's guardian should be if you and your spouse pass away?

Andrew and I asked my parents to take our kids if need be, and they agreed, (which leads one to question their mental stability), but that can only be the plan for so long. At some point they will reach an age where it becomes unfair and/or unrealistic to burden them with young children to care for. We need a contingency plan.

Neither Andrew or I can make a decision as to who we would want to care for our kids if we die and my parents are unable to step in. All we can agree on is who we don't want them to end up with.

There are so many things to consider when making this decision. It's a plan we hope never comes into play, but such an important one to make. A million questions come to mind, as do a million concerns and desires.

I feel like I want them to be raised by someone like me. Only better.

I would want them to go to someone who would be compassionate to a fault after losing their world, their security, their parents, everything they have known.

I would want them to go to people who would treat them like they treat their own children so that my kids don't grow up feeling like second-class citizens.

Money wouldn't be an issue, because we have adequate life insurance to take care of their needs and not burden the new parents, but that responsibility needs to sit in the hands of people who will manage the money fairly, wisely, and in a way that there will still be some left when Trent is in high school.

The kids would need to go to someone who will involve both sides of our family in the kid's lives.

They would need to go to a home where they will be taught the gospel of Jesus Christ by people who live it.

They would need to go to people who are not already overwhelmed with life.

And then there's the politics of it. Do you tell everyone which people have accepted that task, should it arise, or should it remain confidential until it has to be outed?

Do you tell your kids who those people will be so that they would be prepared, or is that too much doom and gloom to put on a kid's mind?

Actually, I think that I already told Cameron and Ethan that they would go to live with Nana and Papa if Daddy and I died. If I recall correctly, they wanted to know if they would have their own rooms.

And finally, how do you decide between two or more possible choices? I try to picture my kids living with choice A or choice B, etc...but I can't imagine it in any scenario. It's a hard thing to do. I don't want to picture them with anyone else, and my brain can't seem to break down that protective barrier and really see it.

Eeny-meeny-miney-mo cannot be employed here.

So my question to you is; if this is a decision you have already made, how did you decide? What things did you consider? What clinched the decision? Were there problems that you didn't consider or didn't see coming until you had already made the decision? How do you do this?