Adventures in Babysitting

Great movie.

Just for the record, babysitting Sophia, Carter, and Natalie can be the most fun the world, or the worst days of your life. I’m babysitting all three every Thursday. The first five weeks went something like this:

Week One: Not bad, only half day because Elizabeth got out of work early
Week Two: Worst day of my life.
Week Three: Lots of fun, fairly easy.
Week Four: The other worst day of my life.
Week Five: A moderately bad day.

There are several elements that go into making the day either good or bad, but NAPS are the key:

Carter’s the easiest here. Chuck him in his bed at around 1ish, and he’ll be in there for at least a couple hours. Sophia and Natalie compete for being the most difficult.

Sophie’s taken a lot of really crappy naps at Brad and Elizabeth’s house. She likes it really, really dark. There are no dark rooms in that house. But she’s also just difficult to get down for a nap. She’s having a word explosion, walked at the end of the 9th month, drinks from a sippy cup, does cartwheels, rides a bike, can recite the periodic table of elements, mows the lawn, and can finish the New York Times crossword puzzle in under 10 minutes, but she refuses to hold her own bottle. The good news is, for most of this week, she’s been falling asleep on her own without having to be rocked, which is new.

At least, we think she’s asleep…tonight, after several hours, we found that she had just been really quiet…

Natalie, on the other hand, is really weird when it comes to naps. The first morning I was there, she woke up at 7:15, and then zonked out at 8am (yes, that’s only 45 minutes of being awake) for a freakin’ hour and a half! Two weeks ago, on the other hand, she wouldn’t go to sleep till after noon, and she gets really cranky when she doesn’t sleep (which, of course, she could easily remedy by, you know, going to sleep, but you can’t explain these things to infants. They don’t listen to reason.) So the randomness (and brevity) of Natalie’s naps make the day really unpredictable.

And then you get to the point in the afternoon where Natalie’s only happy if she’s being held at exactly 4 feet, 2.7865432 inches from the ground, facing northeast, with her legs at a 117 degree angle, and the slightest movement from any of these exact measurements will result in crying. And then, just as you get those measurements down perfectly, Sophia and Carter decide they want to climb up the chimney or something.

Fun times.