Adventures in Babysitting

A couple of weeks ago, my husband was running late, unable to get to the house before I had to leave with Princess for our Brownie Girl Scout meeting. In the past, I had taken all three kids with me to the meeting but quickly discovered that solution leaves the kids absolutely out of control. Lil'T would disrupt the meeting at every turn. She's just too little to understand that sometimes Mommy gets busy with other things. As far as she is concerned, she's the sun. We all orbit. I'm Mercury. My husband was due to arrive within the hour so I made a tactical decision. I decided to let my son babysit Lil'T. I figured, if I let them watch a couple of Dora tapes, their father would be home and no terrible crisis could arise in that short time that a 10 year old couldn't handle.

But I was wrong. Here is the transcript of a voice mail I received. My cellphone has spotty coverage where we hold the meetings so this call went to voice mail.

"Mom, I need help. T for some reason has been peeing like crazy. When we were in the middle of the movie, she peed a whole lot! And she finally said, 'I need to go to the bathroom.' And so, I made her take a bath. She took a bath and then I'm in C's room and I finally get her all dried off and I'm about to put on the diaper and then I see water (laughing a little) streaming from her you-know-where. And I think: 'Where is she getting that water? I thought that I...' and then my brain suddenly starts moving and my head takes in the HORROR. T has made a big, big soak of urine in C's carpet. Come now. I need help. This is urgent. URGENT."

He ended the message by giving our home phone number followed by, "as if you didn't know that."

Hubby and I were amazed that he had decided to give Lil'T a bath. In giving her the bath, he showed great problem solving skills and really took care of her. A little pee on the carpet is nothing new. Shoot, when he was little, there was the notorious brown-berry incident which was far worse than pee in the carpet. (Nature's Miracle lives up to its name when cleaning up these type of accidents b.t.w.) He did a great job and for short periods of time, I'll let him sit for me. I won't let him sit Princess. That would be a terrible scene, but for Lil'T, That has shown great affection and responsibility.

I've got the message saved on my voice mail. If you want to hear it first hand, let me know and I can try to forward it to your box. Wouldn't it be nice if I could figure out how to upload audio? Hey, I'm just thrilled that I figured out how to embed video. And how cool is it that I'm finally on YouTube?

I'm so proud of my son. That's a good boy.