This past Christmas break I had the privilege to help my favourite niece with a little babysitting. Her daycare decided to shut down for a few days over Christmas and she needed a bit of help with the watching of her beautiful four year old wipper snapper. I signed on for two days. Two FULL days. I am not talking about four hour stints here. Two, entire full work days (plus travel time=long, long days). I figured how hard could it be? She's a cute little girl. Don't they just colour all day and watch Frozen? I immediately told the Old Boy and the Youngest Money Sucker they had to help. Old Boy was in as long as he could convince her to sit and watch golf/hockey/any other sport with him and the Youngest Money Sucker pretty much said "Hell no! I will be in my room." Nice. The first day came and I quickly realized that I was so unqualified to watch girl type people. Within the first 45 minutes I was begging the other family members to take a one hour "answer the four year olds questions" shift. My reasoning was that if we each took a shift answering the endless stream of ridiculous questions, then the others could take a break (therefore preventing all of us from going insane at the same time). Never in my life have I met a person who talked that much and asked that many questions! Boys may be dirty and a little dumb but Holy Hannah they are much quieter! (In hindsight maybe they are a little dumber because they don't ask a million and a half questions? Huh. I'm however sticking with puberty completely destroying their grey matter. That's my theory.)
After the first full day of child minding I realized that colouring and movie watching was not this little person's cup of tea. For heavens sake she never stopped moving OR talking for more than one entire full minute. I was mentally exhausted. Not only did she exude endless amounts of energy, she also was an extremely smooth manipulator (thank goodness for texting or I would have clearly let her eat all the candy and chocolate that she told me her mom let her eat "all the time" within the first two minutes of arriving!) I still had another full day. Oh holy crap.
Day two arrives and I think I am much more prepared. My helpers however have flown the coop and found important "errands" they needed to run. Jerks. I think I am super creative and take her to the library which, as it turns out, emits another litany of questions I did not see coming. After the library we do lunch then beautiful, wonderful nap time. My niece lets me in on a little napping secret so I tell her that she just needs to take a teeny, tiny nap but I won't start the "nap timer" until she is asleep (my niece is a genius) to which I leave the room only to listen to her talk to herself for over an hour. Non-stop jabbering. To. Herself. How can one small person have that much to say?
Fun side of this story is that during her nap jabber time I texted the oldest money sucker (who was on the same floor as Chatty Cathy) and asked him if he still thought his little brother was all that bad. I got a resounding "Oh Hell No". That was the first win of the day. The second win was me reminding the oldest how vitally important BIRTH CONTROL is. He concurred. Lessons learned for everyone!!!!!
