'Sweet Potato Queens' Guide to Raising Children for Fun and Profit by Jill Conner Browne

Author:Jill Conner Browne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

17

A Pulse Does Not a Babysitter Make

I do know full well just how important it is to spend time with our children—and I know even fuller and weller how absolutely vital it is to get away from them from time to time. The babysitting issue is just huge. I mean, you think twice before you let someone else drive your car—we’re talking about your pearl beyond price here. Who’re you gonna trust to hold it for a while?

Once Peep got to the stage of consuming foodstuffs that were not produced on the premises of my body, I hired a sitter to come to the house while I went to teach a class or two. This was working so well—I thought. Then one day, my down-the-street neighbor came by to tell me that he had driven by earlier and seen my baby in the park across the street— by herself. She walked quite well at nine months and he said that she appeared to be having herself a large time, toddling around the unoccupied swing set. He stopped the car—thank God—and retrieved the little wanderer and walked over to my house, where the front door was standing wide open, giving him an easy view of the babysitter, flopped on the sofa, talking on the phone.

So that arrangement didn’t last too long. Didn’t last much past my conversation with the neighbor, actually.

Granted, the more time wears on and the more worn out we become, the better just about any babysitter will look to us. Good Dog, Carl is our favorite fantasy. (If you’re unfamiliar with that book, go get it—you’ll see what I mean. Rottweiler as caregiver.)

Queen Pam had a built-in bevy of babysitters right across the hall—beer-drinking, sports-on-TV-loving lawyers. All she had to do was chill a case of brews, show ’em where Baby Gen’s bottles were and remind them how to warm ’em up for her, turn on the game, and she and her hubby had instant date night. (I’m assuming these were brand-new lawyers, still paying off student loans, who couldn’t afford beer, let alone a television.) The lawyers were an efficient bunch of sots. They figured out that the baby’s Portacrib would fit perfectly under the glass-top coffee table, so that’s where they would park little Gen during the games. Every time they reached for their beers, there would be the smiling/sleeping/crying baby, in plain sight—and only one of those scenarios required any action from them. I wonder if Gen will go to law school one day.

That lawyerly bunch apparently had some kind of coffee-table theme going. They were at somebody else’s house drinking one night, and when an exceptionally short member of the crew passed out on the floor in the middle of the room, the others simply rolled him under the wooden coffee table in order to keep the pathway to the beer cooler navigable. They went home and forgot him—or perhaps they forgot him and then went home—in any case, he was left under the low, heavy wooden table.

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