Gangsta Babysittas

Charlie and I have been babysitting our friends' kids this week. It's been fun because way back in the days before Kai, Jett and their son Will were together every day, under the care of a lovely, quiet polish woman. Once their baby and our baby were born I stopped working, and the nanny we shared started watching their two boys. Sadly and suddenly last month she had to hasten back to Poland for a family emergency and they were left scrambling for child care. Enter The Johnsons.

It's been fun. The kids are exhuasted at the end of the day from all of their playing, fighting, and playing some more. Ironically Will goes to preschool in the morning and Jett goes in the afternoon, so these two old friends rarely cross paths. But Kai plays all day with whichever boys are home, and he's loving it. We go to their house every day, where they have a carpeted but furniture-free basement and a backyard, plus the novelty of different toys.

Every morning Charlie drops the boys and me off at our friends' house, then heads back home to do stuff. I spend the morning negotiating peace treaties with the greediest lobbiests on the planet: toddlers. It's just Jett, me, and two 20-month olds. Some mornings are better than others, in that sometimes Jett has 5 time outs, and sometimes he has 3. The little boys are easy to manage for the most part.

Today Will didn't go to school, so Charlie stayed and helped me with all four boys all day. Good thing too, because the first hour was not pretty. Jett started hitting and Will started tattling and pretty soon they were pointing their hands at each other and shooting imaginary bullets out of their index fingers. I tried to stop them from shooting their finger-guns at each other, but unfortunately I can not put their own fingers out of their reach.

Later we decided to take the boys outside to play in the snow. Getting dressed for outside burned about 30 minutes of daylight, which was a bonus. We made the mistake of bundling all four boys into their coats and snowpants before putting any of their boots on, so they were all stuck inside, puffy and sweaty and covered in nylon, none of them able to go outside until one of them was completely dressed. But of course none of them would sit down or sit still long enough to put their boots on. They just kept running around in big puffy circles, rebounding off of the walls and wrestling with each other in the hallway like a bunch of sweaty sumo-wrestlers.

Then it happened. Charlie told Will that he could go outside as soon as he put his freaking boots on. "Yeah,"three-year-old Will agreed, "I have to get my freaking boots on."

On Monday we started with four happy little boys and by Friday we've got a house full of gun-toting, smack-talking toddlers. Anybody else need a babysitter? The kids love us.