Saturday, July 18, 2009

Another Check Off the HIP List

Add another check to the Home Improvement Project List. Hip, hip!

On Saturday, our neighbor came over with a whole mess of power tools and helped Matt de- and reconstruct the stoops leading into our garage. Said stoops stuck about 1" too far to allow our garage to be a two-car. Fine now, but believe me, when both parties are leaving around 5:30 am no one wants to be stuck with the driveway parking spot, scraping us at the crack o' dawn. The reconstruction was successful and seemed to go pretty quickly, in my non-helping opinion.

Which is sayin' alot, cos guess what I was doing while the HIP went on? Baby-sitting.

Don't get me wrong: I love little kids, and I was a tried and true member of the baby-sitting circuit from about 1994 right up through grad school. (Even post grad school when I first moved to Winston which made my parents proud. Look, Ma, I'm putting that Master's degree to great use!) I consider myself someone with a well of patience and a vast tolerance for the peppering of questions that all children over the age of 3 seem to dole out.

But ya'll, I wasn't exactly expecting to baby-sit. I had a touch of a wine headache and plans to make my hardwood floors shiny and my laundry folded.

Enter stage left: Neighbor, age 7. "Boy, your house sure smells like a dog."

"You look fifteen. Are you fifteen?"

"Do you have anything to eat?" "I have carrots or apples." "YUUUUUUCK."

"Your socks smell. Do you know how to do laundry?"

"Do you have water balloons? I have a hundred. Let's fill them."

All I can say is, Thank goodness for Spongebob. Whew. Good thing I'm warming up with a canine - trouble as he may be, he has never rejected my food OR asked me a single question. Wonder what happened to that vast well of patience....

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