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Manny being manny
A few weeks ago, some friends of ours--colleagues of Lauren--asked me in very flattering terms whether I'd be willing to serve as--to use Lauren's phraseology--a "manny" for their 3-year-old twins. It seems their regular nanny is taking a 10-week trip through Asia, so I'm covering Mondays (and occasionally other days) for the next ten weeks.
Today was my first day on the job, so not surprisingly I spent all last dreaming about unlikely ways that it could all go wrong. I'm sure I went through several abduction scenarios and several other "I can't find the kids" scenarios. It's odd, though, because--despite having pretty much no experience babysitting or caring for younger siblings or... whatever other family members people get that sort of experience with--I really wasn't too worried about it. I mean, sure, things can go wrong or I can be unprepared for something, but I'm a pretty bright guy and I figure I can improvise as needed for anything I don't actually know. Plus, their mom sent me a pretty detailed little guidebook to the care and feeding of their kids.
So far, so good. It's not like everything is smooth sailing--they have small little attention spans and they don't always do what you tell them--but so it goes. They're three, so they're a lot of fun. They're just fun to watch or to hear what they say. They're constantly asking "why" and they're excited about pretty much everything they're not scared of. Case in point: they were really excited to go see where I lived. I thought I had a great plan to take them to our house to meet Beaker (who wouldn't love Beaker?) and maybe sing them a song with the piano (who wouldn't love to hear me sing and play?), then give them a snack and take the twins and Beaker on a walk, killing two birds with one stone.
That probably would have been fine with Girl_Twin, but Boy_Twin turned out to be terrified of Beaker. Little, incredibly friendly Beaker--despite the fact that they have a huge yellow lab at home (but I guess he's pretty much scared of any animal that isn't their dog, stuffed, or in a book (and some of those might even get him, I'm not sure). They also weren't interested in the piano or anything I was doing with it. Also, I quickly realized how much less kid-friendly our house was than theirs is: not dangerous, necessarily, but easily destroyed by three-year-olds, anyway. And since I needed to hold their hands through most of the walk, walking Beaker at the same time probably wouldn't have worked out even if she hadn't turned out to be a terrifying beast. And just to top it off, I miss-timed it so that they were late for their scheduled snack. ::sigh:: I'm still getting used to all this.
I'll be back over there this Friday and then every Monday between now and sometime in December. Should be fun (not to mention lucrative)--and not bad preparation for that thing we've got coming up in December or January.