Incoherent Scribblings

The Best Summer

The story is fairly cliché for the working moms out there: Mom works full-time, the youngest child goes to daycare, and the oldest child is in school. Mom has a flexible schedule that allows her to finish work in time to pick the oldest child up from school, thus avoiding placing the older child in daycare and saving hundreds of dollars during the school year.

However, once school lets out for the summer, Mom has a problem: Does she put the oldest child in daycare, does she find cheap(er) labor in the form of a teenage babysitter that is willing to work for a few dollars an hour, or does she entertain alternate solutions?

This was exactly the situation my sister found herself facing around mid-April. Because of financial issues, she preferred that my niece only go to daycare for the summer as a last resort, so she began with the desperate-for-money teenage babysitter. Unfortunately a trial run during spring break with said babysitter posed a new set of problems. The babysitter was too young to drive and her mom demanded that she make 50 more dollars a month than my sister had offered.

And as I am sure you have guessed by now, all of this just so happened to (more or less) coincide with my switch over to the graveyard shift.

After the unsuccessful run through with the babysitter, my sister approached me about whether or not I would be willing to watch my niece over the summer. I had suspected that my sister would come to me with such a request when she told me about the babysitter dilemma, so when it happened I was not surprised. In fact, I had been thinking about the situation and had decided that while I would not offer to do it, if Sis asked me, I would seriously consider it.

Obviously the main consideration was my sleeping schedule. Would I be able to work midnight to eight, watch my 7 year old niece until 3:00 in the afternoon, and still be able to get enough rest that I wouldn’t become a zombie? Was my niece old enough to understand that I was going to have to sleep at least part of the time? Was she old enough to let me sleep for a couple of hours in the morning without her killing herself?

Sis and I talked about it and I told her that I thought my niece was old (and well-behaved) enough that it could be done. Sis talked to my niece and laid the ground rules. I talked with my niece and she told me she was a big girl and promised not to get into any trouble.

Though I didn’t get as much sleep as I would have liked, I didn’t really become a zombie until August and the summer went smoothly. My niece was a big girl and let me nap for around two hours every morning. On the days that she wasn’t enrolled in some summer activity, we did fun stuff like swimming, reading, coloring, and cross stitching and I towed her along with me as I went about my daily business of paying bills, doing laundry, and applying for jobs.

A lot of people around town assumed she was my daughter and the ones that knew better teased me about spoiling her. I admit that I may have spoiled her a teensy bit, but now that I am getting ready to move away, I wouldn’t change a moment of the entire summer if I could.