So kids are funny.
Perhaps it's by design where the size of their craniums don't quite sync up to their body weight so that they just fall over ever...so......slowly. Or maybe it is by sheer accident because their black and white vision allows them to not be so grown up and complicate already discombobulated emotions (there's that English major...). I say this because over the weekend, MANY life factures (both kid and grown-up sized) collided like the good ol' Big Bang. Here's what happened:
I had to spend the previous week dealing with personal family affairs which caused me to have to not only leave town, but leave my babysitting job a day early. Compounded with lady hormones and preexisting life conditions called "I-don't-really-need-to-deal-with-this-motherf*****-s***. Period." I just was having a tough time being around young things. So as you can already forsee, things may not turn out so well. Now I have the fortune of babysitting a brother and sister pair who are 5 years apart. Seeing as they will be the frequent topic of conversation, I shall call the six year old boy March and the 10-nearing-11 year old sister June (I usually only babysit March....I'm a paid playdate essentially! And June is just way too mature for her own good and had a life schedule I secretly envy). March and I have a tenuous relationship in which I often wonder if he is really a forty-six year old man in a little boy body or if he is just bonkers for NO REASON. (I often find that I ask him unbeknownst to my brain 'Who are you March?" to which he will look up at me contemplatively and say "...I'm March D.Babysitter. -Blinks- You're so crazy...". This has actually happened. No, seriously.) Despite this random age/time-vortexy thingy, we usually have a lot of fun together. Like stupid I don't wanna grow-Toys 'R Us fun.
Back to the story. So March misses his father a great deal, who is in LA currently filming tv shows and having essentially my life. What has become apparent is that this "missing a parent syndrome" can manifest in many ways in a little body. Most of them are ugly. And most of them requiring a LOT of patience from you as a babysitter/caregiver. Both things which I didn't have that day. For March, it was a combination of clinging to his Mother and crying at her having to leave him with me, and not listening to me or anyone (which for a six year old he is generally very good about). So, to assuage the time we had left, March and I played Spies. It was very aerodynamic and cardio. And involved Nerf guns. Which was SO EPIC. So June finally finished her homework for the night and joined us. Here is where the pole heads South. June and March don't get along. At all. I think this has a lot to do with their 5 year age gap and they don't often play together. But when they do play is it On-like-Donkey-Kong-kids-so-tell-Crash-Bandicoot-to-Move-over. They were rough. And March just couldn't understand that when someone said 'Stop', it was not a suggestion. This my readers, resulted in a March experience a five-min timeout. (Tip of the day: How to make Time Outs Effective.)
I had to sit down and explain to him why the time-out had happened. I found that it was important to really break down that he isn't bad or not good, but that he did something that wasn't good. Differentiation is KEY. This helped him understand that a fun activity stops being fun when not everyone is happy. Now he wasn't too happy about the time out and neither was the mom surprisingly- but that's a different post altogether- and there were probably things I did that weren't so great (cause I'm only 22...yes...yes I am), but all you can do is try. However, I was scared when picking him up from school today that things between us were going to create even more static between us. Sure enough, I walked up to his kindergarden line and he popped up like a Spring Weed and grabbed my hand and off we went to the park where I got a tan, he got sunburned (only slightly!), and we read Star Wars books.
I suppose this really became a lesson about how even adults need time out too. I had to learn things won't always be right when you babysit. Even if you are quite good at it.
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