Babysitting Adventures: Birth Control
Babysitting.
It's an odd word when you stop and think about it.
Baby + sitting.
Sitting and watching a baby? Sitting on a baby? I feel like there are so many more appropriate things it could be called. Baby-watching. Child-herding. Hiding in the bathroom and locking the door. In theater, there are actually positions for "child wranglers." That makes more sense to me than "babysitting." Sigh.
For better or worse, children are our future. And once upon a time, someone had the grand idea of leaving slightly older children in charge of younger children, and thought this was a good idea. Somehow, it feels like a recipe for disaster. I started watching kids from our church congregation when I was twelve. Not because I was a budding domestic goddess, dreaming of familial tranquility, but because I wanted the cash. Gimme them dolla-dolla bills yo. Whereas some of my peers seemed to glory in the changing of diapers, cleaning of puke, and wails of children, I felt decidedly awkward. In my mind, the best baby was a sleeping baby.
Now, I had the true love waits/abstinence talk with my parents. As a young teen, I knew no sex was the only 100% form of birth control. However, despite the STD horror stories and other various scare tactics, the most effective form of convincing me to stick with abstinence was our neighbor's twins. (Coincidentally, these twins were born the same year as Outspoken Twin and Quiet Twin--the girls were born in May, the Outspoken/Quiet duo in June.) Our poor neighbors were overwhelmed with a toddler and two babies that wouldn't sleep through the night. My mother and grandmother, good Samaritans that they are, offered to watch the girls overnight. The exhausted parents were only too eager to accept the invitation. It was the summer I turned 16 and I was mostly ambivalent when it came to kids. Take 'em or leave 'em--but if I have to take 'em, compensate me for letting your kid slobber all over me. Somehow, I was conscripted into my mother's charity scheme, probably by sheer virtue of being an underage resident of the house. The babies were collected around dusk, recently fed and seemingly pleasant. My younger sister, much more the caretaker, played and cuddled with the babies while I sat watching from a corner of the room. When it came time for bed, we set up the twins and bedded ourselves down on the floor. Sometime during the night, my mom woke me up. She was bouncing a crying baby and asked me to heat the bottle. I bumbled out to the kitchen, our dog following me the whole way. Bringing the bottle back, my mom told me it was too hot and that I had to go run it under cold water. Handing off the bottle, I collapsed back onto the floor. This interrupted sleep business was definitely not to my liking. As I drifted back to dreamland, I was awakened by another urgent whisper. Peeling my eyes open, I saw in the darkness that Baby A was back to sleep but Baby B was now awake. We went through the same routine. Handing off a bottle for the second time, I recall saying something along the lines of: "I'm never having kids." My mom came back with some type of wisdom-laden response: "You'll change your mind when you meet the right guy."
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Time will tell. I'm pretty sure my retort was something like: "Well I better not have twins." (That may come back to bite me.) But in the meantime, crying babies interrupting my beauty sleep left a lasting impression and acted as the most convincing form of birth control for me. One night of that and I vowed to not let a boy so much as sneeze on me. Just in case...
So parents worried about your kids having kids while still being kids...consider babysitting. I recommend overnight with twins, or perhaps triplets or quadruplets if you're really worried.
It's an odd word when you stop and think about it.
Baby + sitting.
Sitting and watching a baby? Sitting on a baby? I feel like there are so many more appropriate things it could be called. Baby-watching. Child-herding. Hiding in the bathroom and locking the door. In theater, there are actually positions for "child wranglers." That makes more sense to me than "babysitting." Sigh.
For better or worse, children are our future. And once upon a time, someone had the grand idea of leaving slightly older children in charge of younger children, and thought this was a good idea. Somehow, it feels like a recipe for disaster. I started watching kids from our church congregation when I was twelve. Not because I was a budding domestic goddess, dreaming of familial tranquility, but because I wanted the cash. Gimme them dolla-dolla bills yo. Whereas some of my peers seemed to glory in the changing of diapers, cleaning of puke, and wails of children, I felt decidedly awkward. In my mind, the best baby was a sleeping baby.
Now, I had the true love waits/abstinence talk with my parents. As a young teen, I knew no sex was the only 100% form of birth control. However, despite the STD horror stories and other various scare tactics, the most effective form of convincing me to stick with abstinence was our neighbor's twins. (Coincidentally, these twins were born the same year as Outspoken Twin and Quiet Twin--the girls were born in May, the Outspoken/Quiet duo in June.) Our poor neighbors were overwhelmed with a toddler and two babies that wouldn't sleep through the night. My mother and grandmother, good Samaritans that they are, offered to watch the girls overnight. The exhausted parents were only too eager to accept the invitation. It was the summer I turned 16 and I was mostly ambivalent when it came to kids. Take 'em or leave 'em--but if I have to take 'em, compensate me for letting your kid slobber all over me. Somehow, I was conscripted into my mother's charity scheme, probably by sheer virtue of being an underage resident of the house. The babies were collected around dusk, recently fed and seemingly pleasant. My younger sister, much more the caretaker, played and cuddled with the babies while I sat watching from a corner of the room. When it came time for bed, we set up the twins and bedded ourselves down on the floor. Sometime during the night, my mom woke me up. She was bouncing a crying baby and asked me to heat the bottle. I bumbled out to the kitchen, our dog following me the whole way. Bringing the bottle back, my mom told me it was too hot and that I had to go run it under cold water. Handing off the bottle, I collapsed back onto the floor. This interrupted sleep business was definitely not to my liking. As I drifted back to dreamland, I was awakened by another urgent whisper. Peeling my eyes open, I saw in the darkness that Baby A was back to sleep but Baby B was now awake. We went through the same routine. Handing off a bottle for the second time, I recall saying something along the lines of: "I'm never having kids." My mom came back with some type of wisdom-laden response: "You'll change your mind when you meet the right guy."
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Time will tell. I'm pretty sure my retort was something like: "Well I better not have twins." (That may come back to bite me.) But in the meantime, crying babies interrupting my beauty sleep left a lasting impression and acted as the most convincing form of birth control for me. One night of that and I vowed to not let a boy so much as sneeze on me. Just in case...
So parents worried about your kids having kids while still being kids...consider babysitting. I recommend overnight with twins, or perhaps triplets or quadruplets if you're really worried.
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