Night Work
So I've been hired to run the Extramural Student Help Desk in the library this week (study break? holiday? what are those?), which is sorta kinda occupying my evenings.
Still and all, some friends asked me to babysit their children so they could head for the hills (a barbecue at Fielding) last night, so I went there after work.
Little Miss Clementina vanished into her room about the time I arrived, though Fergus (the baby) was still in the process of getting his nappies changed and pyjamas put on. We played with balls for a bit, then the children and the adults moved along their respective preordained paths, leaving me in the living room with a cat, a dog, a dvd player, and several movies to watch.
Suss, a scabby, half-bald, stand-offish, territorial farmcat slept on my lap all through Bridget Jones' Diary: The Edge of Reason. I've discovered his secret weakness for chick flicks, I conclude.
Then there was a double-billing of The Cat Returns and Charlie Chaplin. Somewhere in there Fergus woke up and felt lonely and panicky, so we had a long, solemn, eloquent discourse vis-a-vis my ability to fetch his parents home and somewhere in there he stopped crying and I sang him a lullaby and put him back to bed. Never underestimate the power of reasoned discourse when dealing with children.
And sometime on the fading edge of midnight the parents came back, bent on hot noodles, and I got a ride home, full up on baby-dandling and cat-napping, and fell asleep soon after.
Still and all, some friends asked me to babysit their children so they could head for the hills (a barbecue at Fielding) last night, so I went there after work.
Little Miss Clementina vanished into her room about the time I arrived, though Fergus (the baby) was still in the process of getting his nappies changed and pyjamas put on. We played with balls for a bit, then the children and the adults moved along their respective preordained paths, leaving me in the living room with a cat, a dog, a dvd player, and several movies to watch.
Suss, a scabby, half-bald, stand-offish, territorial farmcat slept on my lap all through Bridget Jones' Diary: The Edge of Reason. I've discovered his secret weakness for chick flicks, I conclude.
Then there was a double-billing of The Cat Returns and Charlie Chaplin. Somewhere in there Fergus woke up and felt lonely and panicky, so we had a long, solemn, eloquent discourse vis-a-vis my ability to fetch his parents home and somewhere in there he stopped crying and I sang him a lullaby and put him back to bed. Never underestimate the power of reasoned discourse when dealing with children.
And sometime on the fading edge of midnight the parents came back, bent on hot noodles, and I got a ride home, full up on baby-dandling and cat-napping, and fell asleep soon after.
posted by theamazingcatherine | 9:18 am
1 Comments:
My last babysit was for four, two of whom were not in their own home, and the other two of whom did not know me at all well. Fortunately it went OK.
Yvonne, Mynhard and kids (Dagmara, 3 and Otomar, nearly 2) had flown to Wellington and stayed with friends of theirs who had two boys (about 6 and 3.) The rest of the adults went to dinner leaving me with the hoard. (But it was a *cute* hoard.) The plan was that Dagmara and Otomar would go to sleep in the living room (so I'd be close to hand) and be transfered downstairs to bed when everyone got home. Dagmara, however, wanted to try out the camp bed, so she and Otomar squeezed in. Otomar dropped right off, but Dagmara came padding up the stairs in a while. After lots of picture books for Dagmara and the older resident boy, and shifting Otomar to the main bed so Dagmara had room to sleep, all went well.
The movie was "The Big Lebowski", played ear-strainingly quiet so as to be able to potentially hear upset kids. I tried "Richard III" (the Nazi version) but poor volume and Shakespearian English did not mix well for me.
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