As Babysitters Do

Always on the lookout for good TV shows to stream in their entirety, I appreciated the interactive "Want to Watch" button on the NY Times list of the 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century. Of course, I also enjoyed the "Have Seen" button and the resulting list of 25 shows I already watched; although it's not a very braggable percentage, I love a tally sheet. Even more granular? Once I marked a show as "seen," I could also record whether I liked it. Call me easy; I only disliked two.

Even though I followed the list when it was released, 20 at a time, read it again a few times, and discussed it show by show with Treat, Riley, and Julie, it was not at all on my mind when I went to babysit yesterday. "Here's the TV remote," my friend said before she left, "watch whatever you want."

I laughed because I rarely watch television in the middle of the day, but I thanked her anyway. After she left, the baby was asleep, and her husband was working remotely in the study, and after a few minutes on my phone, I looked at the big screen above the fireplace. For some reason, Friday Night Lights, number 14 on the list, and a show I had heard a lot about but had never even seen an episode of, popped into my head. 

"Have you ever seen this?" I asked her husband when he came in to check on the still-sleeping baby and me. He shook his head no. I was about halfway into episode one, and it didn't take long to bring him up to speed. From then on, he joined me and the baby, who woke up, ate, burped, and went back to sleep, whenever there was a break in his work. We became absorbed in the drama of the small-town Texas high school football team. Somehow it seemed a good fit for the vibe of the job.

"Wow!" he said to me at the end of episode three, "you are really putting a dent in this show!"

"Without commercials?" I shrugged. "They're only about 40 minutes. Plus, isn't that what babysitters do? Watch the kids, then watch TV? It's definitely how we did it in high school!"

"That seems appropriate," he agreed, nodding at the kids on the TV .

How Life Goes On

The babysitting request came just as Delaney dropped her packed bag in the dining room. Her dad was on the way to drive her home when Heidi's phone chimed. Would we be available to watch our friends' little girl, Olivia, for a couple hours? 

Would we!

And as it turned out, Olivia's dad dropped her off a few minutes before Delaney's dad picked her up, so our 18-year-old guest got a chance to meet and hold our 5-month-old guest, and so did her dad. 

"I think I'm ready for the next generation!" he smiled, bouncing the baby.

I raised my eyebrows. "Right now?" I asked.

He shrugged, obviously enjoying the infant endorphins. "Whenever it happens," he answered. "Whenever it happens."

One Satisfied Customer

 At the end of the essay unit yesterday, I was helping a student finish his writing. "What's your claim?" I asked him.

"That you are a terrible babysitter," he told me, "because you are bossy, evil, and manipulative."

I nodded, unfazed. I knew he was writing his essay about the story I had written about a bad babysitting job. "What's your evidence?" I asked him.

We spent the next few minutes going over the story and polishing his argument. "Thanks!" he said when we were through. "That's a lot better."

"I guess I'm a better teacher than babysitter," I laughed.

"You really are!" he agreed.

Star of the Essay

"We should have the kids read that story you wrote about babysitting," my friend Mary suggested in our CLT planning meeting today after I confessed to abridging another author's work to make it more accessible to the sixth graders.

"That would be funny," I laughed.

"Is the character of Tracey a good babysitter?" Mary asked.

"That's definitely debatable," I said, "and plus, I would love to read a bunch of essays about... me!"

I Always Dance When the Movie is Over

It seems like not so long ago that our house was often filled on the weekends with children, and we still have many of the toys and craft supplies to prove it. We got a chance to pull all those fun things out of the attic today, when we did a little babysitting as a favor to our friend Susan.

Ellie, 6, and Abby, 3 spent the afternoon while their parents and Aunt Susu went to a play and early supper to celebrate their mom's birthday. The girls know us slightly, mostly as Isabel's people, but they settled in easily and quickly to what promised to be a fun few hours.

Following that teacher maxim that it's better to plan too much than too little, we had a lot of options for them when they arrived. Frog and butterfly cookies were baked and ready to decorate, the playground up the hill was a must-do destination, there were also DVDs, shrinky dinks, and bracelet kits, but it was the Play Skool barn and plastic tea set, that got the first squeals of approval.

And the fun rolled on from there. The cookies were elaborately sprinkled, and we used the tea set to enjoy them with ice water and strawberries. The playground was next, mostly to burn off some of that sugar, and those girls did not disappoint-- they ran the track, drove the fire truck, and flew the space ship for nearly an hour and a half. Back at home, they chose the movie The Lorax to relax with, and at the end, Abby sprang up and invited us all to dance with the end credits, which we did, gladly.

"Noooooooooo," they cried when their parents came to the door. "We don't want to go home! We want to stay here forever!"

We rolled our eyes and laughed, and helped pack them up to go, but man! I totally knew what they meant.

Nine

On the day that I received the phone call telling me that I finally had a teaching job of my own, I was babysitting my oldest nephew, who was a little over a year old at the time, and it was with him that I celebrated my new career-- we went out to lunch and got balloons. Hooray Aunt Tracey! Since then, I have had the great privilege of teaching both him and his brother when they were in sixth grade.

I have no children of my own, and it's likely that these boys are the closest thing I will ever know to that. Both of them are smart, thoughtful and inquisitive people who demonstrated curiosity and a genuine delight in learning from the earliest of ages. When they were little, it seemed as if they were destined to do well in school, and they have. Neither one of them particularly likes school, though, and that's a fact I find hard to dismiss. They are intelligent, compliant and successful, but they don't like school.