Desperate Housewife

I am going to share with you now one of my business ventures of the last week. This week has been good for me with Handy Hannah coming to the rescue on three occasions: in the guise of an Italian tutor, a remote copy writer and as a babysitter. Hooray! I'm off to blow my earnings on Amazon.

But if being a bit of a handy-woman has taught me something, it's that I don't really enjoy being a handy-woman very much. Ok so the tutoring and writing is right up my proverbial street, but the babysitting, well it wasn't strictly babysitting so much as damage control and living the life of a desperate housewife for two-and-a-half days.

Buckle your seatbelts - this one's a rough ride.

I arrive on Sunday evening to take the baton from the previous babysitter who has managed to get the kids in bed. My job is more involved than hers as I'm going to be staying with these kids and being both Mummy and Daddy for Monday and Tuesday. Fortunately when i arrived on Sunday evening they were asleep. I say they, I mean one of them was. One popped down to say hello, I popped her back off to bed to say goodbye and go to sleep.

I had to get used to my surroundings as I was to be staying there and meeting the kids' undreasonable demands of 'I want this now!' - if I didn't know there 'this' was, then you could say I would have fallen at the first hurdle...

So I opened all the drawers and rooted in all the cupboards. I knew I had to feed myself (the kids were taken care of for the most part) so I wanted to know what kind of fridge bingo I'd been left with. Well for a start most of it was off. Bleurgh. I managed to collate some items of food that were only recently out-of-date and got myself a toasted bagel. Which the dog ate half of when I wasn't looking.

Oh.

It's not going all to well.

Monday morning came and eventually the kids woke up and galvanised themselves. I got them downstairs for breakfast and ran into a problem. Older boy wanted nutella for breakfast. His mother wanted him to have cereal and an apple. I gave him a compromise. If he had cereal and an apple, then he could have nutella. Predictably he faffed and cried so much that there was no time for nutella. I hate it when that happens.

They were only five minutes late for school, which considering my time management is certainly an achievement. And when I picked them up at the end of the day I thought that we were in for a nice, relaxed afternoon. I didn't and we weren't. We had nutella-gate all over again and I caved for the sake of diplomacy. The kids' tutor came and though she was only supposed to stay for and hour and fifteen minutes, because of all the faffing and, again, tears, she ended up leaving an hour and fifteen minutes after she should have left.

The kids weren't bathed or fed.

I remedied that and got the wee lassie in bed, leaving the boy to get ready himself. He comes out later and tells me he's not feeling well. Yeah, probably because he ate so much nutella before. I said sleep was the best cure. He said he wanted to go back to the bathroom and that he was having, ahem, bowel issues. He spent another twenty minutes on the loo and only gave up after I stood outside the door and told him I wouldn't go away until he came out. At that point he told me about the fact he might have pooped in the bath. way to go - tell me when it's dried on. He went off to bed and I caught a glimpse of his iPod in his hand. Hang on! Has he just spent the last twenty minutes on his iPod!? I prised it off him, safe in the knowledge that he'd played me like a fiddle.

Tuesday morning was easier and things resolved themselves a lot faster than the previous day. Still this time we were ten minutes late for school. No, I don't understand it either. So that evening after school we were going to the gym for swimming lessons. When I say 'we', I mean I was ferrying these kids and staying with them whilst they had their swimming lessons.

We dumped out stuff in the cafe and got a drink. The kids made quite a scene when the boy took what the girl thought was the last cookie and then climbed all over the counter while I paid. We then sat down to do homework. Hold on. No pencils. The kids didn't think to bring any and I thought the world would end when I suggested they use pens.

Oh dear.

In fact nowhere in the gym could I find a pencil. Great. So time ticked on and I took the girl for her swimming lesson. When she was done I got them to choose what they wanted for tea. After an altercation with the boy - he wanted to choose from the adult menu, I thought that after a cooked dinner at school, a snack at home, and a cookie, he would be better with the kids' menu - we sat down for dinner. I say 'we' again, I really mean I cut up bits of sausage and picked up stray baked beans where I could. I then sent the boy for his swimming lesson so that I could keep an eye on his younger sister in the play area.

The lesson time came and went and half an hour after it finished, the boy came into the cafe in tears because I hadn't picked him up. I did feel awful, but in the instructions I was left, it quite clearly stated that the boy was more than capable of getting sorted on his own, and when he disappeared to check the time of his lesson before tea I was convinced he was more than capable of pulling a few stunts.

So we were late back and still had homework to do. If you thought there had been tears before, then there were more tears than ever. Both kids were knackered after running circles round me and they desperately wanted their mummy. In the midst of all that the dog ate a tissue and sicked it up again.

While I waited the parents to return home that evening, I decided that babysitting probably wasn't for me.