How do you cope with good behavior? ~ November 9, 1989

David Heiller

The best laid plans of Day Care and Babysitter …

We thought we had The Plan this time. Malika, our four-year-old daughter (sometimes known as Mollie the Hun), had finally reached her limit.

Malika (a.k.a. Mollie) and her magic wand.
Maybe it was magic that made her behave?

Three weeks of not brushing her teeth, of not going potty at the right time or in the right place. Three weeks of throwing her brother’s mouse stamp in the wood stove, of writing with a magic marker on her forehead and on a living room pillow, of doing laps around Marilyn Edin and Becky Lourey in the Oak Lake Church basement.

Three weeks of sending her to bed, of yelling. Three weeks of Cindy and I wondering out loud: “What are we going to do with her?”

We brainstormed ideas. The Rack. Drawing and quartering. Taking her to Joint Powers Board meetings. Making her empty the chamber pot. Nothing clicked. Finally Sunday night, when Mollie ran from one last outstretched toothbrush, Cindy cracked.

“That does it. I’m calling Sarah.”

Mollie knew at once that Cindy was not idling her threats. She started crying, real tears. “No, no, don’t call Sarah.”

Cindy called Sarah.

Sarah was a year or two younger in this photo, 
but she had Mollie's number when she came
that day and that is ALL that mattered.

No, Sarah is not a snaggle-toothed hag from a B-movie clutching a chair in one hand and a whip in the other. She’s something much worse in the eyes of a four-year-old who loves her Day Care; she is a Babysitter. And a good one at that. Above railroading. Street-wise, school-smart, 13 going on 20, like all teenagers these days, yet young enough to remember the tricks of an imposter like Mollie.

So Noah went to Day Care on Monday, and Mollie stayed home with Sarah.

Mollie met us at the door when we came home. Her first words: “Can Sarah stay a little longer?”

“What?” her startled father asked.

“Can Sarah stay a little longer?”

Sarah and Mollie, it turned out, had become best buddies. They had played Maple Town. Read books. Cleaned the play room and her bedroom. Brought in firewood. Eaten ice cream.

“How’d it go?” I asked Sarah, peering close, looking for bruise marks, trembling hands.

“Fine. She took a nap from 12:30 to 3,” Sarah replied cheerfully. Mollie hasn’t taken a nap in at least a year.

So much for that experiment, I thought. Cindy had a different perception: Mollie had fun with Sarah, yes, but she was good because she wanted to go to Day Care. She took a nap because she knew that was the only way she could cope with being so good.

(How do YOU cope with being good? There’s a pleasant dilemma. Maybe we should all take more naps.)

Cindy may be right. Just now, Mollie has come downstairs to demand that we rub her back, a nightly ritual before she falls asleep.

Reading and back-rubs, all part of the deal at bedtime.

“If you don’t come and rub my back, you know what will happen? You will rub my back forever!” she hollers.

If ever there was a living Hell...

“We’re going to need a babysitter tomorrow?” Cindy asks her.

“No!”

“Then get to bed now.”

Mollie runs upstairs, bangs her feet on her window. “Tell Daddy to rub my back,” she resumes.

“Go rub her back,” Cindy tells me.

“Why don’t you?” I ask, not looking up from the computer.

“Because when I put her to bed, I said, ‘I’m going to rub your back now,’ and she didn’t want me to, so I said, ‘If I don’t rub your back now, I’m not going to rub it,’ and she said fine. You didn’t make that deal with her.”

Life with Mollie is a life of deal making. “Rub my back, Dad.”

There’s a lesson in all this, somewhere. I was just going to state it profoundly. But it can wait. Right now, I’d better go rub Mollie’s back.

Singing the praises of Jane Doe ~ June 13, 1991

David Heiller

This is a true story about babysitting. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Babysitters. They come in all shapes, sizes, sexes, ages, and abilities, and we’ve run the gamut over the past eight years.

Some have been good with the kids and do some of the “extras” too, like picking up the house and keeping the dishes washed. Others have been good housekeepers but chained the kids to their bedposts. Then there are those who don’t even wipe the table and get chained to the bedposts themselves by the kids after falling for that fatal line: “Mommy and Daddy let us do this to them all the time.”

We’ve had some very good babysitters, including Jane Doe, who we have hired for the summer.

Babysitters... the good ones make
life so good, and the great ones fill us
with gratitude, even decades later.

Jane Doe watches Noah and Mollie one day a week, while Cindy and I put together this newspaper. Jane started last week. She had watched them before at night, but never for a whole day.

When we came home that first evening, Mollie raced down to greet us. I asked how things had gone. She said fine. Jane had played with them, had walked with them to the culvert to see whether Noah’s turtle egg had hatched yet, had fed them a good lunch and supper, had gotten them washed and brushed and “jammied” and up to bed, after reading a story (of course).

I noticed that the living room seemed brighter somehow. I looked closely at the windows, then stepped up to one and peered closely. “Did Jane clean the windows?” I asked with some disbelief in my voice. “Yes, and I helped,” Mollie said with a proud tone. That explained why all the paper towels were gone.

I looked at the carpet. It was spotless. “Did she vacuum too?” I said in that same tone. “Yes, and she swept and shook the rugs too, “ Mollie answered in a voice just a tad too righteous, one that said maybe I should have been the one who had swept and shook the rugs and vacuumed and washed windows.

(We are not slobs, and I really had been meaning to wash the windows at least, but this time of year, with the garden and biking and visiting friends and a dozen other excuses tugging, the house does get a bit shaggy.)

I walked through the house in a trance. Jane had cleared off the dining room table, a job that normally takes a front-end loader. She had washed dishes and baked cookies. She had picked ticks off the dogs and cleaned the outside of the refrigerator. She had taken the clothes off the line and folded them.

Jane had even cleaned the pantry. This is not a typo: SHE HAD CLEANED THE PANTRY, a place where fruit jars and paper plates and plastic bags and cookie tins and graham cracker boxes all get stacked on top of one another until they fall over and you pick them up and shove them back on the shelves again Now totally shocked, I turned on the switch to the water pump. It kicked in, then stopped, like a pump is supposed to. But it was unusual, because the pump has been waterlogged for a few weeks, and it usually doesn’t stop running until I hit the switch. I walked outside to the basement door and peered inside, half expecting to see a new pump which Jane had installed. Nope, no new pump. But somehow Jane had gotten the old one working. I figure she shamed it into submission. My mother used to get me to chop ice off the porch that way when I would watch football games on TV. She’d just grab the ice spud and start chopping, and soon I’d feel so guilty that I’d take it from her and finish the job. That’s what Jane had done to the pump.

I glanced out to the fields, half expecting to see a new pole barn which Jane had erected, and maybe a couple acres fenced in to boot, with some young stock and a 50-cow herd of Holsteins grazing on the hay bales which she had also baled, after clearing out the willows and hazel brush that have taken over the back 40.

Cindy was equally impressed. In fact, when she returned from Jane’s house and had a look for herself, she called Jane up and thanked her again.

Maybe this was all a fluke, like a guy who hits a home run in his first at bat in the major leagues, and then never hits another. But I don’t think so. We may have another Kirby Puckett on our hands here. If baseball were babysitting, this kid would be rich.

But hey, you parents: don’t get any ideas about spiriting Jane Doe for your own two kids and unkempt home. Like I said, her name has been changed to protect the innocent, and the parents who hire her. The Twins would never trade Kirby Puckett, would they?