Babysitting a 3.5 year old and a 1 year old is hard work!! Andrew and I spent yesterday afternoon and evening babysitting Matthew and Angela. It wasn’t really non-stop, because Gabe and Julie came home after the wedding ceremony to give the kids a bath and get things sorted before going back for the reception.
I got there early because Andrew had to play hockey, so he dropped me off and I played a bit with Matthew. The photo above is of Matthew washing all his bikes and truck (only two vehicles are in the photo) while his dad washed the real cars. 🙂
The babysitting went pretty well really, with just a couple of more difficult times. Matthew had a couple of tantrums throughout the day, one when we were trying to feed him dinner. He doesn’t eat much at the best of times, and because he wouldn’t leave the TV to have his dinner, Andrew decided to turn the TV off. That set off a tantrum where Matthew stood at the glass front door and cried while he called for his dad. I was feeding Angela at the time and Andrew was cooking us some dinner, so we left him there for a while but kept asking him to come and eat his dinner. Finally (after maybe 10 minutes) when Angela’s dinner was finished I picked him and and sat down with him and tried to give him some comfort. He was tense in my arms, but his crying did slow down and finally stopped. I then asked him to eat some dinner, and while he wouldn’t feed himself he didn’t seem to mind me shovelling the food into his mouth. And after dinner he started playing with his blocks again and was as happy as before. When I told Julie about his tantrum, she told me not to worry because he does that to her as well…stands crying at the front door calling for his dad. That sort of made me feel a bit better about it.
Angela didn’t cause us any grief, except that she had a short grissle at one stage while she was in her cot, so I went to investigate and found she had spew in her hair. There was a little torch that Gabe and Julie use to see what’s going on without having to turn on the main light, but I couldn’t see where the spew was. I could smell it though! I felt all around her and she seemed dry, so I just left her. Gabe and Julie sorted it out when they got back, and also put our minds to rest in that we wouldn’t have known where the spare bedding was anyway, so there wasn’t much we could have done about it.
Andrew and I fell asleep on the couch after both kids were in bed. After playing with the kids, walking Angela around the house about a million times (she just loves grabbing your hands and walking and gets grumpy when you stop), trying to get them to eat dinner and go to bed, we were both knackered!!!
