Why I don’t ... babysit very often | Gearoid Holland
Gearoid Holland explains the perils of offering a helping hand
A few weeks ago, my sister asked me to babysit her two children, James (6) and Clodagh (4). Sure isn’t that what doting uncles are for?The trick was how to keep them occupied. I tried the usual suspects (but not the film of the same name); snap, board games, toys, DVDs of Spongebob. Eventually I got out some colouring books, colouring pencils and paints. To my surprise I found that Clodagh is a dab hand at finger-painting. Her mother, too, discovered this when she came home later that night and saw the trail of pawprints along the walls of the entrance hallway. You let them out of your sight for two minutes...However, the biggest complication related to getting the pair to sleep. You’d think that putting up so much resistance would tire them out but apparently it’s a last-person standing competition – and they’ve already started training for the Rio Olympics in 2016!Eventually, I discovered the source of James’ resistance; the bogeyman was hiding under the bed. James wasn’t convinced that a flashlight combined with the prodding of a hurley stick was enough to scare the monster out from under the bed, so unfortunately I took a male, and therefore ultimately flawed, approach to the problem; I suggested a simple solution. Jump up and down on the bed until you squish the monster.You’re saying “uh oh” right now, aren’t you? If only you’d said it louder I might have heard it in time..The thing is, it actually worked on the night, and it tired him out too. Win-win! Unfortunately, a week later, James got motion sickness doing it (that’s the official story, though I think it was his mother’s cooking) and threw up all over the bedsheets. Since his parents couldn’t get a straight answer out of him as to what had happened, and couldn’t get an appointment with the doctor until the afternoon, he skipped half a day of school.... so obviously he told his friends all the details!James’s best friend Cathal had a genuine fear about bogeymen and actually took in the advice for what it was originally intended. The good news was that Cathal did not spend the night kept awake by fear of the bogeyman and next morning he woke up with a spring in his step. The bad news was that it took nearly two hours of surgery to remove it.Another friend of James’s, Henry, decided to apply the tactic to a different enemy... he hated pickle sandwiches. He also introduced a new element, a mallet usually reserved for tenderising steak. His parents tracked me down as the source of the “bogeyman advice”, and it took me f**king AGES to scrub the walls clean! (Frankly I think that it had actually improved the wallpaper.... I should have charged them a fee for interior decorating consultancy services.)Unfortunately my bad advice comes from a long history of “improvising” solutions to problems. Too much MacGyver at a young age perhaps. The natural response to hearing the phrase “don’t let the bed-bugs bite” is not, apparently, to drown one’s bed in their aunt’s most expensive perfume, which she’d received as a 40th birthday present from a close friend, and was keeping for a special occasion. Even if her husband said afterwards that the smell was strong enough to knock out a racehorse.I should have used my older brother’s aftershave instead. It was apparently strong enough to literally sweep women off their feet so getting a few bugs to float away out of bedsheets should have presented no challenge at all to it.My only successful “improvised solution” from my youth was how to deal with elderly women who tug your cheek like a jumper in a clothes sale. I pretended that it was a special “secret handshake” and returned the gesture. It’s safe to say she never tried it again!The trick is to have a big innocent smile on your face while you do it. Even naivety can be a strength sometimes. It certainly worked for Clodagh as she stared up at me with those baby blue eyes, colour-coordinated with her dripping palms. She couldn’t help it, could she?