Recently, one of the offspring of Ms. Hotflash produced
offspring of her own, a boy to add to the 2 year old girl previously produced.
In a spurt of good will, I offered to watch aforementioned offspring for a few
weeks while his mother went back to work.
Baby boy is a good baby and has not peed in my face once
(winning!), but I have encountered other challenges in my adventures in
babysitting.
First of all, his parents live in Trendy Hipster Land, an
urban neighborhood replete with microbreweries, organic juice bars, vintage
clothing stores, trendy hipster clothing stores, and many, many hipsters riding
their bicycles somewhere with their messenger bags. Don’t you people have jobs?
It is depressing to spend a large amount of time in the home
of the (somewhat) newly married, as their kitchenware and appliances are SO
MUCH NICER than the tired items we have at home, which includes a fondue pot
from 1977. They have utensils that are nice and shiny and weigh 2 pounds!
Mixers and food processors and smoothie making thingies!
The appliances! Oh, the appliances! These new-fangled
appliances have more blinking lights and settings that Mission Control in
Houston. For example, the washing machine has a myriad of settings, including
“Casual” and “Sanitize”. What a dilemma. Of course I want to sanitize, who
doesn’t? But that setting takes 2 hours. If I use “Casual”, will people know I
don’t care about the cleanliness of my clothes? Will I exude a casual attitude
that could prevent me from getting a good table at restaurants or a promotion
at work? And will “Casual” remove the spit-up from my shoulders?
Then there’s the strollers, aka Urban Assault Vehicles. This
family owns about 5 strollers, all which have their own devious method of
opening and closing. Let’s consider the Uppa Baby, the umbrella stroller of
choice for the up and coming toddler. Although I could open it, I could not
figure out how to KEEP it open, and it’s probably a bad idea to traverse down
the street with the stroller collapsing on a 2 year old. I resorted to Youtube,
which has a number of videos on how to open the damn Uppa Baby (this is
obviously a bad sign). Of course, none
of the videos corresponded to my particular Uppa Baby. Fortunately I resolved
the problem by swearing and stomping on it, which magically “clicked” the
stroller open.
But the greatest challenge has been the remote. Or should I
say “remotes”. If I want to Netflix and
I have one week to go. I shall master the strollers and
appliances! I shall binge watch whatever I want, remotes be damned! And
hopefully not get peed in the face.
