We have always called up my brothers to come out and babysit out kids when Eric and I go out on a date. My brothers are good to do it, and the kids get along with them fairly well, but let's be real here - they are late teens-early twenty teenage boys who love video games. They play video games, they mess up the house, they mess up the kids, they put kids down in dirty diapers, and typically it is all sorts of chaos when we get home. Like I said, I love my brothers, but they are boys, and boys just aren't as well trained for these kinds of things as girls are.
You would think in a church as big as ours we would have a plethora of options for babysitters. I think we probably have more options than I realize, but somehow leaving our three kids at home alone with a 12 year-old girl seemed crazy . . . . even though I vividly remember babysitting at that age. But we ventured out into the ward and found a girl that used to be in my Activity Days group and asked her to babysit.
When we pulled into the driveway that first night that she babysat the house was dark, Eric and I started trying to figure out how much you pay a babysitter. With my brothers we just pull a number out of thin air and then tack on some more for gas since they drive so far to get out here. We decided that we would give her $25 (for about 3 1/2 hours of babysitting) if the kids were awake and I said I would raise it to $30 if everyone was asleep and the house was clean. This may seem like a lot to pay a babysitter, but if I find a good one, I wan to KEEP HER!!! And lo and behold, we walked in, the house was clean, the toys were put away, the kids were all sleeping (with clean bums), the dishes were done, and our cute babysitter was sitting on the couch watching Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.
HIRED!!!!
We snagged her pretty much every weekend for the next month. It was awesome. And too good to be true, of course we would have a hiccup.
About two weekends ago we went out to dinner with my aunt, my cousin, and their partners. This time when our beloved babysitter came she didn't bring her cell phone, so we needed to leave one with her. We would typically leave my phone since Eric has so many more people who text him, but since we were going out with my family we thought we had better take my phone and leave Erics.
Now Eric has this one inappopriate friend. The kids call him J-Baum, and that name should clue any Phoenixers who read this blog as to who it is and make this post about a million times more funny. This kid is hilarious!!!! And the whole family loves him, don't think we don't. In fact, I have been told that Eric has it already worked out that if he dies first, J-Baum will be the new man in our lifes. But J-Baum is that one friend that you can always count on to send you messages that say things like "I am never drinking again!!!!" or "I wrote in lipstick on this girls mirror 'You are out of toilet paper'" and those kinds of messages. So it was with great hesitation that Eric left his phone with our babysitter. Add to the stress that J-Baum hadn't texted all day, which means it was a ticking time bomb for when he would next send a text message. We even left saying "Just ignore any inappropriate texts you may get, ha ha ha ha" only we weren't joking.
Honestly I hoped that she wouldn't ever have a reason to read the text messages. But about an hour into dinner I got a text message from Eric's phone from our babysitter just talking about how the night was going. And there went my hopes that she would never read any text messages.
When we finally got home that night, I gave her the money, and asked if she could watch our kiddos again the following weekend for a Christmas party my cousin was having. She was kind of "Oh ya, I'll have to ask" which she has never said before, she just says yes or no. I was thinking that maybe the kids had just been bad or something and she needed a little space.
Boy was I wrong.
When I walk back into the house from taking her home, Eric is laughing at the kitchen counter, phone in hand. I asked him what he was laughing about, and he shows me the only other text that came in that night other than the ones I sent. It was from J-Baum. Now, I can think of about every single text message that this fellow has sent, both to me and Eric, and I can honestly say that pretty much all of them could have been sent to our 12 year-old babysitter without a problem. She would have just looked at them, been liek weird and moved on. But the one that was sent was probably the best example of a text a 12 year-old babysitter should never get.
"Hey, what are you wearing? Just kidding, what are you NOT wearing???"
MORTIFYING.
Well not really. It's actually surprisingly, ecstatically, masterpiece-style funny. But at the same time mortifying. Because there are only two options:
1: We get arrested for soliciting a minor.
2: She thinks we have some freaky relationship that involves my husband getting dirty text messages from other guys.
Neither option seems to fun for us.
What would you do is what I ask my friends?
I ended up calling her, and apologizing profusely! But there is this part of me that wonders if I should have just let it go, if I shoudl have explained to her parents, or how I should have handled it.
Like I said, one of the funniest things that could pretty much ever happen when you think about it. But it's that funny thing that is funny when it happens to someone else, not so funny when it happens to you. Gotta love that J-Baum.
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