2004-07-27
surprised i am not saying googaa
Oh my gentle darlings, I am sorry to have been gone for so long. How can I ever make it up to you? With a funny entry about diapers? Why certainly!
Both Saturday and yesterday were filled with baby cries, diaper changes, and the occasional fit with chocolate pudding. That is right my fiends, I had to babysit. OK, so I didn't have to. That is to say no one held a gun to my head/knife to my throat/sang Like a Virgin over and over and forced me. More like I needed money and this seemed like the perfect enterprise. Of course I still don't enjoy humans of the shrunken species[I do live across from the Devil Children after all]but the children I babysat for were nicer than most I have encountered in past lives.
Keira is a three year old cutie pie. No more sickly sweet talk, I promise. Just smack me with your glove if I do and I'll either duel you at dawn or desist immediately.[Hey life's fifty-fifty my space cadets] Gianna is her 6-month old sister. Both of their parents are deaf so Keira knows very little in the way of language. Most of the things she knows from her signs. Right now she is attending speech therapy so that when she goes off to school, she can communicate with the other children. In her world, sign language is our early English.
Of course it struck me late Friday that both Keira and Gianna are in the age of diapers. Keira by rights, should be toilet-trained but she wasn't when I babysat her last year and darn it all if she still isn't. Now, I am a pretty competent babysitter for one child. Two at once was going to be a tad of a challenge for this babysitting novice.
Six month olds need constant attention. Three year olds are only a year out of the terrible twos. You see where I am driving to by now don't you? When Keira wanted to swing, Gianna wanted to be picked up. So here was Gianna balancing on my hip with my free hand pushing Keira in the swing.
And of course, as if on some strange clock of synchrosity, they dirtied their diapers at the same time. So while I am trying to change a squirming Gianna, Keira is crying because she is dirty. While I am wrestling the diaper out of teething Gianna's mouth, Keira is jumping up and down signing dirty over and over again. They couldn't just wet themselves either. Mainly every time I had to change them, it was Feces City. No Urinetown at all.[ok I just made a Broadway reference during a talk about diaper changing..how bizarre is that]Is that normal? Is that moral? Are they dying of some strange form of piles? No, tongues were not blue, and everyone was living clean in a matter of minutes.
Needless to say, thirty bucks was bargain. Six hours a day and two days. Thirty each time. Except I think the dad stiffed me because his wife gave me thirty and he gave me twenty-six for the same amount of hours. To complain or not to complain...
(Of course I didn't complain. Though whilst peddaling home on my brand new second-hand bicycle I did think about testing the brakes and going back. Don't bite the hand that probably touched a stinky baby I always say, so I didn't go back.)
This has been your baby juggling diarist. Watch as I juggle them with one hand.
Quote of the day:"So does this change your mind about having children?"-[Linda]