Babysitting

I have a confession to make that may make me seem like an awful, petty person:
I'm not crazy about babysitting. Sometimes, I even feel a little resentful. I think back to raising my three kids four hours away from the closest family.
But then I remember what it felt like to be a young mother at the end of my rope.
And, whether I'm there to play or to babysit, I always enjoy my great nieces.
In the midst of a stressful week (I think I'll be able to write about the stresses next week, and you won't believe how mafia-esque they are), I had agreed to babysit from 9-2 on Thursday. Then I had a mammogram. Then I had to go teach.
So, deep breath, and I got to their house at 9 with a coffee in hand.
For the morning, it was just me and Regan, who is 21 months old now. She has these big brown eyes and eyelashes so long that she had oatmeal stuck in them when I arrived. It was just me and her for the morning while her big sister went to pre-school.
Regan loves to play in the water, so I set her in the bath for about 45 minutes.

She played happily until an itsy bitsy spider came out the water spout. Then she screamed.
I took a tissue and squished the spider then threw him in the trashcan.
Regan was still hesitant.
"Spider take a nap?" she asked.
I agreed that the spider was definitely taking a nap.
We had to walk to pick up 4-year-old Caroline at preschool and I noticed that the preschool was near a chocolate shop.
Regan and I went to the chocolate shop.

Little kids aren't sophisticated enough to enjoy chocolates, so I got the girls suckers called PushPops, which made a sticky mess, but that's what indulgent aunts are for. I got myself a salted caramel chocolate.

When Regan went down for a nap, Caroline and I made no-bake cookies. Their whole family is gluten free, so I made sure we used gluten free oatmeal. Caroline made sure to get every bit of chocolate out of the bowl afterward.

In spite of my hesitation at the beginning of the day, I enjoyed spending that one-on-one time with the girls.

Saturday Snapshots -- Babysitting

To participate in the Saturday Snapshot meme, post a photo that you (or a friend of family member) have taken. Then leave a direct link to your post on West Metro Mommy. Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. Please don't post random photos that you find online.
My week got very busy.
I started teaching three new classes in the evening; Tucker's high school musical opened and I've been helping with costumes for a couple of weeks; Suddenly, I had to babysit two days this week because my sister-in-law was struck down with the flu and ended up in the hospital.
My sister-in-law usually watches her three grandkids on Thursday and Friday. So I took a shift watching the three kids both days. Exhausting but exhilarating.
Caroline is 4. She's not allowed to eat wheat, so I introduced her to chocolate-covered raisins. We decided this was a healthy snack. You can see she is delighted.

Regan is 20 months old. She was supposed to be napping but had a dirty diaper and unfortunately decided to explore. She needed a bath before I could put her down for a nap again.
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Grant is 14 months old. He stacked these cans up by himself very meticulously. When I looked up childhood milestones, I saw that babies should be able to stack 2 to 3 blocks at the age of 18 months. He has six cans stacked up here. I guess he'll be an engineer or an architect.

Hope you all had a good week.

Overscheduled Sunday

By 1 p.m. today, I was ready for a nap.
I was up just after 6 and met my friend Najah for a run along Antrim Lake.

I told Najah I needed to take a picture of this fallen tree because it would frame the top of a picture, but I never zoomed in enough to make the fallen tree a frame.

These beautifully polished toes ran 7. 5 miles this morning

Mom and I went to get pedicures while I visited her in Florida. The nail technician from Vietnam asked if I wanted flowers on my big toes. Although no one will see them this winter, I agreed to the flower. She dabbed on white petals, then touched them with pink. She added silver along the tips of my other toenails. What fun.
Then I hurried home from my run and showered so I could watch Earl's niece's daughters, 4-year-old Caroline and 1-year-old Regan.
Their dad was gone for the weekend and their poor mom was exhausted, as you would expect. She took Sunday morning to go to yoga class while Earl and I babysat.

Regan is a blur of activity. Her laughs are guffaws. She loves to sing and dance and carry around a baby doll by its head. 

Caroline was thrilled by a gift of a bouquet of suckers. She only ate one while we were there. She lost her bottom tooth when a potato chip got wedged in there and forced it out. The dentist isn't worried and said she'll get her permanent tooth in a few years.

After the morning running then playing with the girls, I'm definitely ready for a nap. I can't believe I had three little ones and we all survived. I reminded Earl that he moved to Columbus when our kids were two, four and six and we didn't move with him for two months. I can't imagine being the sole caregiver for two months with three little kids.
Luckily, I can relax this afternoon before I start teaching again Monday morning.

Babysitting

Today we babysat for baby Caroline, who is now 20 months old. The cats entertain her. And she entertains the cats by reading to them. Whenever I take a picture of her, she asks to see "the baby." Today I was showing her the pictures on my iPhone when she began to use her index finger to scroll through them. She even pushed the arrow to start videos over and over again. At one point, she used her finger and thumb to enlarge the picture. She knows more about the iPhone than I do, thanks to her grandfather. With the iPhone, I can turn the camera around so Caroline can see herself. She must have taken 30 pictures of herself and some video too. She played peekaboo with herself on the iPhone. I'll try to load it.

A Baby in the House

One day this week, we had the privilege of watching Caroline, Earl's niece's baby. I guess she isn't technically a baby any more since she turned one last week. Caroline's mom works two days a week and Caroline usually stays with her grandparents who have adjusted their work schedule to keep her. This week though, Earl's sister and her husband were off bicycling in Napa Valley (because someone had to) and we agreed to watch Caroline. She arrived at 8:30 a.m.
I was at work and stayed at work until 1 p.m. That means that my big, sometimes loud, husband was solely in charge of Caroline.
Now, Earl always took care of our kids when they were little, so I knew he could do it. But Caroline has had a fear or dislike of Earl since she was little. Something about him made her cry. Maybe because he's so big or because he would try to rough house with her. When I got home, Earl and Caroline were fast friends. She was wearing a flower behind her ear that had wilted. She had played with the trains we spread out on the floor and was especially fascinated by the cats.
Caroline doesn't walk yet, but she crawls everywhere and has discovered that bouncing on her butt backwards is a terrific way to cover ground. She bounces so high up in the air that she is practically standing. It looks like some sort of yoga move the way she places her feet together and bounces. Here are a couple of blurry photos of her in action.


This is nowhere near the height of her bounce. She is spring-loaded in the diaper area.


You may notice that she is bouncing on top of a calculator and has a remote control nearby. The remote was her favorite toy. She would press the buttons then look quickly at the televistion to see if she had turned it on.
Earl and I packed her into her jogging stroller and took her for a walk to our little downtown. We had coffee while she sucked on a straw full of water and shared bites of Earl's pumpkin ginger scone.

Then Earl took a nap while Caroline had a playdate with the 16-month-old three houses down. He was into kissing and she kept pushing him away. She was too busy eating leaves that I kept pulling from her mouth.
Our boys didn't want much to do with her at first. As Spencer walked up the back sidewalk, I was carrying a wet, disposable diaper to the trash can.
"Oh, gross. I was going to eat but now I've lost my appetite," he said.
The boys sat across the table from Caroline during dinner. They didn't want to risk gross food touching them. They watched in amazement as Caroline grasped handfuls of bananas, tomatoes, tuna and cheerios.
"She shoves her whole hand in her mouth to get one bite," Spencer observed.
Then she growled at them and they almost fell over laughing.
"Don't get too close to her food," Earl warned them as she growled again.
That girl can eat.

My observations after her dad picked her up at 7:30 that night:
Babies are cute but exhausting.
I never have learned how to get babies to sleep, which was obvious from the fact that she skipped her afternoon nap. None of my kids were good sleepers.
There is nothing as sweet as a baby belly and the smell of their soft heads.
It's good to get a baby fix.

Baby Texts

Yesterday was Earl's niece's birthday. I don't know why I say Earl's niece since we've been married 20 years, but I feel too young to have a 32-year-old niece. She brought her 4-month-old over to spend some time with us while she ran errands. Caroline is a little hesitant to warm up to us (especially Earl). But she loves Grace.
We had another beautiful day, so 20 minutes before the end of school, I put her in the stroller and walked up to the high school to meet Grace. Caroline fell asleep shortly after Grace joined us, so we stopped at the coffee shop and continued our walk home. As soon as we got home, Grace scooped her out of the stroller. She hasn't heard the saying: "Let sleeping babies lie."
She wanted to play with Caroline. And, as you can tell from the photo, she had important things to teach her. What four-month-old doesn't know how to text? How's she going to stay in touch with all of her baby friends if she can't text yet?
Caroline is practically going cross-eyed trying to focus on that phone.