How We Train Babysitters

Eva wants to go to Violin Suzuki Camp--badly. She has spent the week fundraising and advertising for weeding for money opportunities during spring break and has been very successful! One neighbor pointed out that a very popular babysitter will be moving this week and that Eva is a logical replacement. She also said that at least one of the families are "hard" to babysit. I scoffed. I seriously doubt Eva is going to experience anything she hasn't taken part in herself or witnessed in our home. Here are a few of the 'highlights' (I'm not saying who did what):

--Running from the babysitter, accomplished in one of two ways: (1) running away into the neighborhood (2) when kind neighbors offered to watch ours they would run home and hide in the house.

--Hiding under the bed and refusing to come out because the babysitter insisted the child wear pajamas. Parents had to come over to diffuse the situation.

--Oil spill in a bedroom. 'Nuff said.

--Various bodily fluids in various rooms of the house that have to be cleaned up--but I still maintain that this kind of thing happens in most homes with kids!

--Blue jello stains in the carpet--they were dipping and licking and there was a spill.

--Miscellaneous holes in the walls. My favorite is the baseball sized hole created by the child who wanted to (1) create a shelf in the wall (2) see how the wall was put together. There was a similar incident to that child's mattress. All I have to say is that the child had better be a wealthy engineer one day and pay for my new house with perfect walls.

--Pushing out the window screens to let the flies out of the house.

--Writing on the walls. Every one of my kids did this. One of them created a huge apple tree mural with dry erase markers on a wall in the bedroom.

--Hammering the TV. Surprisingly, the TV worked for several more years but is now being retired so the hammering evidence will also disappear. An inside door was also hammered a different time by a different child.

--Magnifying glass destruction. One of my children burned a hole in the neighbor's mailbox with a dollar store magnifying glass. We no longer own any type of magnifying glass.

--Kitchen spills. My kids all became masters at various kitchen incidents. The best one was when a child spilled a gallon of milk on my stove, rubbed a couple cubes of butter in it, got a frying pan and added another cube of butter, a lot of cocoa powder, and some sugar and honey. Terrible mess to clean up.

--Poison control--yes we've called a couple of times.

--911. A few of my kids called them too--like the one time when one of my four-year-olds told one of my two-year-olds which numbers to push. And I had to call a few times like when one child disappeared and couldn't be found and when was finally located admitted to watching us look for them and thinking it was funny and another time when a neighbor called me to tell me that another of my kids was riding their bike down main street. Police had to bring that one home.

--Taking the 6-7 foot drop out the bedroom window to sneak out of the house and play. More than one child did this. My favorite was when I finally became very exasperated with the whole thing and decided to just lock the doors and wait. It was a short wait because the child, after working for 30 minutes, couldn't get the backyard gate open because of deep snow. The poor child came up the stairs and dejectedly knocked on the glass doors and said, "Mom, let me in!" I said, "How'd you get out?" The child muttered "Out my bedroom window" I said, "Then you can come in your bedroom window!" and went in the other room and left him out there in the snow for another 20 minutes. I think it's my favorite because it was the last!

--Toaster destruction--I don't know why but they managed to go through three toasters in two to three years afterwhich we didn't own a toaster for a few years. One I had to throw away because someone stuffed a cube of margarine in it and there was no way to clean it out to be certain there would be no grease fire.

--Locking the babysitter out of the house. The guilty child in this case promised us this wouldn't happen again because "it wasn't as fun as it looked in Calvin & Hobbes." The child was obviously disappointed.

I never thought that these experiences would work to our advantage but it seems that they make other families feel secure in asking Eva to babysit. One reason may be that she has a lot of experience and I can't help but think that another reason may be that families won't have to worry about anyone in our family judging what goes on in their home since ours was such a circus for so long!

Personally, I'm just grateful that for the most part it's all over! And another benefit may be that my kids seem to be very creative, hard working, independent, and self-motivated which is serving them well as they get older--all qualities which made the four of them difficult to parent from age 2-7. Perfect practice makes perfect, right? We found out today that Eva not only won first place in physical science for her science fair project at her elementary a few weeks ago but today she placed in the district competition and moves on! Ethan will receive his Webelos badge and 5 other badges tomorrow night. Ivy is showing real excellence and discipline with her music and schoolwork (finally). Nathan is learning to read--he can read a couple of little stories already!