Adventures in Babysitting

I did manage to get an actual job at an actual address last week for three long days. However, they were super fun days, so I hope the annoying little issues of working for an agency are ironed out because I really enjoy this job.

When I worked for this same agency in college for five years (Shut up. I got two degrees.) I sat for hundreds of families, and only ever had one really disastrous experience. Most parents are nice, and most kids are nice, so I could never turn this blog into The Nanny Diaries. However, people are infinitely weird and interesting, and kids are particularly quirky people, so they are occasionally blogable.

Last week I spent more than 30 hours over the course of three days with a five year old I'll call Freckles. The most notable aspect of this assignment was that there were three humongous dogs cooped up with Freckles and me in a two bedroom apartment, including one very large puppy, maybe 30 or 40 pounds, which just loved humping one of the other dog's heads. Then, at one point, it chewed a hole in Freckle's comforter and pulled out a bunch of the stuffing.

It might have been a slim Rottweiler or a stocky Doberman. I asked Freckles what kind of puppy he had, and he told me, "A Chihuahua."

"Are you sure?" I asked him. "I really think Chihuahuas are way smaller than that."

"Yeah," he said, completely deadpan. "She's a Chihuahua."

I still have no idea if he was messing with me or not.

Freckles also told me a joke:

Q: What's sticky?

A: A chicken with goo.

Ha ha ha ha! Right?

Dad of Freckles was quite the character himself. Instead of coming home after work on Friday, he requested that I meet him at a cigar bar to drop Freckles off, which was weird enough. But, once Freckles and I got close to the place, he got really excited because he thought we were going to the cigar bar where they gave him bubble gum. Then he started to doubt himself because maybe it was the other cigar bar that had the bubble gum. Evidently this kid spends a lot of time in cigar bars. Like I said, people are weird.