(Beneath that mild-mannered exterior is: The Babysitter!)
Think back to your summer jobs as a young teenager. How many of you babysat? Without even thinking very hard, I recalled a few of my babysitting horror stories:
1) The 2 year old who screamed at the top of his lungs the entire time his parents golfed. I was sitting for them every morning, all week long, at a resort. The parents paid well, but on Friday I had to walk home because no one from the resort could take me. It was mid-summer, hot, buggy, and a long dirt road measured in miles, not blocks!
2) The parents who came home at 2 a.m. (they were supposed to be home at midnight) and reeked of alcohol. My parents weren’t very happy — dad picked me up and drove me home. They tried to hire me again, but I was always conveniently unavailable.
3) The time a blizzard knocked out the electricity and I was sitting in a very large house with 4 kids and no power. And I couldn’t find the flashlights. I sat next to the phone and called information every few minutes to get the time. I was given a ride home on the snowmobile ’cause the car couldn’t make it up the driveway.
4) The same family in the summer — add a few extra kids, due to a blended family situation. Six kids under the age of 12 and me. Two boys who knew how to make rubber band guns. I didn’t bust the rubberband perps till just before the parents arrived. I was so frustrated by that time, I snapped the homemade weapon into several pieces.
Why did I go back? They paid quite well.
What are your babysitting tales?
(Next installment: Catching Frogs)
ha ha! I love your stories (and your cute pic!) I babysat the summer before 9th grade—two girls (ages 5 and 3) every day all summer. I used to push those little monsters…er, cherubs around in my paper route cart, and I frequently brought them to our house to swim. But nothing fully satiated their thirst for entertainment. It was exhausting. Oh, and the parents had a huge BBQ one weekend and saved their BBQ dishes for me to wash by hand on Monday. At the end of the summer, I had earned $600 and spent all of it on new clothes for high school. (After 8 years of wearing a school uniform, I wanted to look cool.) That was a looooonnnnggg summer.