I was talking to a friend the other day and recounted my story about the worst babysitting experience I ever had.
You might think it was the time where a girl I was watching stubbed her toe on a couch leg and I just had her put ice on it because I thought she was exaggerating how much it hurt. Even though it turns out she broke her toe, that wasn’t the worst time.
The worst time was when I was watching two boys about 4 and 8 years old. We were in their basement, when all of a sudden they ran upstairs, slammed the door shut, and locked it. And they wouldn’t open it. The basement didn’t have an exit and I started to panic a bit, envisioning the parents coming home and finding their kids running amock while I’m locked in the basement. Fortunately, they had a telephone downstairs and I remembered that I had left the front door unlocked. I called my sister, told her “walk over here and come right in the front door without knocking… then, let me out of the basement.” A few minutes later I heard her walk in. The kids said “hi” and then saw her going for the basement door and yelled, “NOOO!” Needless to say I wasn’t terribly happy with them when I got home.
When I told this story, I was asked, “Did you tell their parents what happened?”
My response was, “Oh hell yes! I wasn’t getting paid enough to deal with that!” The parents were very embarrassed and apologized profusely. Indeed, they were so embarrassed that they didn’t call me back to babysit again.
Because there’s no chance it was because they didn’t want someone who was outsmarted by their two kids responsible for their safety.
Posted in Childhood Memories
Stace February 22, 2007, 11:34 pm
That pretty much ranks up with the time two boys tried to push me down the stairs. When they later threatened to throw a piece of ice at my eye, I boldly told them, “Go ahead..it will give me something else to tell your parents about”. Those children, although I babysat quite a number of challenging kiddos, were the worst–and yet I still babysat for them for a number of years. A glutton for punishment I guess–or just desperate for the money.
I know I have quite a few horror stories in my memory somewhere but for my own mental health, I have repressed them.