Babysitting Blues

Having been a mom for more than 13 years, part of my life experience has been hiring babysitters. Recently, I've been able to leave my little ones with one of my older girls, making life much easier. But, while at a recent conference, I didn't have that luxury. So we found a young lady who was willing to stay with our two-year old son.

The first evening of the conference, after having most of two days to recover from his traumatic experience with the thunder storm, we planned to leave our son with the babysitter. The transition was a little rough, and as we walked away I learned my husband had failed to leave either of our cell phone numbers with the babysitter. But, we'd never had any trouble, so we were optimistic things would be fine.

Things were not fine. About halfway through the evening, our son turned into a terror! Disappointed in not getting his way about some trivial thing, my son threw a fit. If only one thing had happened, it wouldn't have been too bad; I'd have been embarrassed and irritated, but it wouldn't have been so bad. But instead of one thing, almost everything went wrong. Our little boy, who is usually pretty well behaved, hit, spit on, and bit the babysitter! And, she couldn't call us because she didn't have our numbers. Maybe our son has an evil twin and that little monster was the one who traumatized the babysitter.


The babysitter is not going to press charges, the bites didn't scare, nor is she planning to bill us for any therapy that may be required as a result of her traumatic experience!


Now, instead of leaving my son with a babysitter and attending the meetings I traveled across four states to attend, I'm in our apartment, writing this post and listening to the conference online! But, my son hasn't used his teeth, mouth, or hands to do anything other than what good little boys are supposed to do. Actually, this is working better. My baby girl is asleep in her bassinet, my son is playing and being a little boy, dinner is in the crock pot, and I had time to publish this post. Maybe some day we'll look back on this little experience and laugh. One thing for sure; I'm always going to make sure anyone brave enough to stay with our son has a phone number with which to reach us! I don't know if we'll find anyone brave enough to stay with him, but if we do, I'm going to make sure they can call if his evil twin shows up again.