I AM GRANDMA!

I am a night person.  I am an all-night person.  I don't sleep well, never have and guessing never will.  Recent studies show that not sleeping well is bad for your health, however the revelation that it could be sleep deprivation and not the Twinkies that makes me fat...makes me happy. That's my excuse and I am sticking to it!  It was because of that sleepless agenda that I haven't seen a sunrise in probably 15 years.  This morning, my first day babysitting in Long Island for grandchild #5, I saw the sun rise.  Actually I saw darkness...and then the sunrise.  Quite frankly from sleep encrusted eyeballs behind a steering wheel it wasn't much of a hurrah.

I allowed myself more than enough time because the belt parkway is always backed up although at this ungodly hour I didn't anticipate much traffic. Wrong.  Unlike me, many, many people navigate this God forsaken parkway and watch the sun rise on a daily basis.  As traffic started flowing at a decent rate, apparently everyone was late for work.  Between the  s l o o o w e r   t h a n   t h i s  school buses and the Kamikazee cars switching lanes at 90 ignoring the fact that I already inhabit that lane, I made my way to the Southern State.  Referring back to my driving handbook days I clearly remember that the right lane was for the slower drivers and the left lane was for passing or speeding.  I opted for the middle lane since I was not speeding, passing or going slow.  The rules may have changed in the last 40 years.  The 12 mile an hour school buses spewing diesel fumes were in the middle as were the kamizazee cars as they made their way around me and the buses.

Two exits onto the Southern State an overhead sign proclaimed a Grey Alert with the plate number and description of a car with apparently a wayward elder person.  I felt sad but wondered, if I had gone missing would it have been a Clairol #37 Alert? As I drove I scanned the plates in hopes of locating said missing elder, however by the fourth exit I had forgotten what the plate number was and was left simply wishing him or her well in their endeavor to escape.   I got to my exit in record time and even had time to stop at Starbucks....which of course wasn't open yet.  I drank my now cold coffee I had brought with me from home before realizing it was in the other cupholder.  I had drank coffee from......well, I would rather not do the math. 

Mary Poppins has nothing on me.....I may have arrived in a Jeep and not floated in via umbrella, her canvas satchel replaced by a torn plastic grocery bag but I am GRANDMA!

tea anyone?

I am babysitting.  The bane of every horror movie.  The baby is asleep upstairs and the house is quiet, except for the infernal clanging on the back deck from one too many wind chimes. It is time for me to nestle myself on the couch to watch Desperate Housewives.  I figured I would make a cup of tea before I got comfortable, and don't they usually leave a little snack for the sitter as well.  As I near the kitchen doorway I realize there is a baby safety gate in place.  For almost ten minutes I pushed and twisted, prodded and poked but I couldn't get the gate to open and I couldn't climb over it either since it stood waist high.  If this was a baby gate it was for the baby orangetan exhibit at the zoo.  I contemplated forgetting about the tea, but now it was the principle.  I should be able to win out over a stupid baby gate.  I pulled a dining room chair over to the gate, stepped up and over forgetting the drop on the other side was going to cripple me.  It didn't but now that I was in...there was no way out.  And certainly not carrying a cup of hot tea.  What if the baby got up?  I was beginning to see why they always wrote the babysitting thing into horror films. I pulled the kitchen nook bench over to the kitchen side of the baby gate from hell, and realized that this in fact would work.  I could have my damn tea after all.  Ha ha, take that baby gate!  I looked through four cupboards and two cabinets and couldn't find a mug or cup or anything that wasn't plastic or had Spongebob on it.  If there hadn't been one in the drainboard by the sink the whole tea deal was a bust.  It took another 10 minutes to find the tea bags that were cleverly hidden, but my cup was now locked and loaded and nuking away in the microwave.  I managed to get up on the bench without falling or burning myself, over the gate and onto the dining room chair still unscalded.  I balanced the cup on a shelf, knocking over a few framed pictures, and decended from the dining room chair.  My pride intact, I felt euphoric at my success. 

I took my tea over to the couch and looked for the remote.  There were three.  I pressed power on one of them.  Nothing.  I pressed TV on another one.  Nothing.  I pressed power on the third one and the box on top of the TV sprung to life.  The TV however remained dark.  I pressed TV on each remote again.  Nothing.  My tea was getting cold.  I decided that it made no sense to fight with yet another inanimate object so I left the remotes and took my tea over to the dining room table where my daughter's laptop sat.  I opened it and clicked on the Internet Explorer icon.  It wanted a password.  I guessed.  Wrong!  I guessed again.  Wrong again!  But then I remembered that my daughter had given me the password the last time I babysat and as I sat there trying to get my short term memory to kick in,  the monitor remained as dark as the TV screen.  I remembered hearing an infomercial guy talking about some product that helped you with memory and he said that simple math equations can sharpen your brain enough to help you remember things.  So there I sat with my cold tea and the dark TV and the laptop waiting patiently for a password doing multiplication out loud.  9 x 2 = 18, 9 x 3 = 24, 9 x 4 = 36, 9 x......and there it was....I remembered!  I typed in the password and waited for my mail to popup.  As I chatted with my sister in law on line the alarm went off.  Blaring, screaming alarm.  And then nothing.  I jumped up and called my son...the one with the broken toe.  The one I called an ass for breaking his toe.  The one I now wanted to limp over and help me check the doors and windows.  He came with a three foot sword.  My hero.  He checked the basement and didn't realize to question why the bench was by the baby gate.  I called my daughter's cell.  No answer.  My other daughter's cell.  Voicemail.  My son-in-law's cell....and she answered.  I couldn't hear her amongst the roar of the venue, but I did hear this....I DONT HAVE AN ALARM.   Oh yes you do!  And it works....and by the way,  I am not babysitting here anymore.  I will watch the baby at my house, buy a crib, a playpen, stay up all nght...whatever it takes....but this will be the last time I baby sit here.  Sorry!