Gracegirl

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

"These Light and Momentary Troubles..."

We interrupt this blog to bring you an unimportant service announcement: This silly post has been inspired by the Baja funny post by TK. (Ya gotta read it!) Okay, so now that I've sufficiently bossed everyone around about what to read, I'll continue.

The unplanned antics of TK reminded me of the bizarre things that have occurred when I've been on the job babysitting. I must preface this post, however, with the fact that both of these stories account for less than one percent of all the babysitting jobs I've had. The others truly have been gems, except for small challenges such as power outage, temper tantrums, etc. And oddly enough, I've had some very bad luck followed by very good luck in many circumstances. Read on.

The first time I encountered trouble was actually the first time I ever babysat. I was upstairs with the kids, playing a board game, and we heard a big thump. I mean a big thump. Of course, I was a bit freaked out, and told the kids to stay upstairs while I investigated. I tiptoed downstairs, walked down the hall & into the living room. I peeked in and found their Christmas tree--horizontal on the floor. I think it had too much wassail. :) Thankfully, I knew their neighbor across the street. She's actually a good friend. She helped me get the tree up. Oddly enough, though, she is one of the shortest people I know, if not the shortest! I was twelve and quite scrawny, so I'm sure it was a funny sight, us trying to get the stupid tree up.

One more recent occurrence of weird babysitting luck was another first-timer. This was the first opportunity I'd had to babysit for a particular family friend--she's a very sweet lady. The kids went outside to get something and I followed them. We grabbed it and headed to the back door. I tried the handle and retried it. We were locked out. I thought, "Ah, what luck!" and we went to the front door. Alas, the diligent parents had locked it soundly. At that point, I thought about how long it would be until the parents were to come home. Hours! We turned around to find their friendly neighbors taking a walk. YESSS! I introduced myself and explained our predicament. They suggested using the garage pad with the kids' birthdays, etc. I tried everything known to man. Nope. Somebody suggested calling the parents. Brilliant! They ran home to get their cell phone. I asked the older child what his parents' cell number was. Uh, he didn't know. Great. I thought, "Man, she hung it in the kitchen. Wonder if I could just see it through the window." I ran around the house and peeked in. Just out of view. "Wow, tonight just couldn't get better!" So I walked around the house again and shook my head. It dawned on me that my mom had the number, so I called her. She gave me the number, and I called it, suddenly feeling some hope. They weren't answering, which seemed very out of character, but I left a message. The boy thought of trying to pry the screen off the open front window. I tried my hardest, but no luck--the top of it was stuck. He offered to get on my shoulders and try the top. So I hoisted him up and after much effort, we pried it off and he went through and unlocked the front door. Seriously, five minutes later, they pull into the driveway. They decided they weren't going to see the movie, that dinner was enough, and they'd wanted to come home. I explained the situation, and told them that I'd just left a message on their cell. They told me that their cell phone had just stopped working. Wow.

1 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home