I think this title sounds like the title of a "Babysitter's Club" book. Anyway, about a month and a half ago I was at David and Natalie's house. I spend the night there every Thursday after I get out of my 10 pm class in Salt Lake. It was Friday morning and Natalie's parents, and one of Sydney's cousins, Whitney, had spent the night too. David and Natalie and her parents decided to go to Walmart for a little bit of shopping. They decided to leave the girls with me. I think they were misled by the fact that I work at a daycare and am going to become an elementary teacher and they thought they could trust me. I guess I was misled too. I can normally handle 20 kids at a time...but not these two apparently. We played dolls for a little bit and read some stories. The girls decided that they wanted to watch a movie so I put Madagascar into the DVD player and sat down on the couch to enjoy the movie. The girls were seated on the floor, a few feet from me, on the other side of the coffee table. They watched for about 10 minutes and lost interest. They began playing dolls again. I could see the tops of their heads from my side of the coffee table and was foolish enough to think that I was adequately supervising them. I got sucked into the movie (it is one of my favorites) and about 30 minutes later it dawned on me that the girls were being unusually quiet. I could still see their heads but felt that "something was not right." (a quote from Madeline, the book I read to Syd EVERY week). I stood up, and as I did, the full glory of my mistake was revealed to me. There, seated on the floor, were two pink-purple-green-blue (and every other color of the rainbow)-monsters. They had gotten into a set of play make-up that Sydney had and had begun their own esthetic training. Luckily, I had my camera. I snapped a few modeling shots. When I asked Syd if we should leave the make-up on to show her mom when she got home, her eyes immediately got very wide and she solemnly told me no. I asked "Don't you think she will like it?" The reply was "I don't think she will." I asked, "So why did you do it if you think your mom won't like it?" The response? "Well, at first I thought she would like it, but now I think she won't." I promptly took the girls upstairs to bathe them. We gathered all the soap Sydney could find in the house to make a bubble bath. The girls played for a bit in the water and I eventually began scrubbing. We heard the garage door open as Natalie returned home. Sydney's eyes got wide again and she began to wash her face in earnest. Natalie came rushing up the stairs. She said "Maren, do you have them in the bathtub? You are a saint!" She inmediately knew from the look on my face that my intentions weren't entirely pure. We washed and scrubbed and did a fairly good job of cleaning the girls up. So now you know, you probably don't want to leave your children with me.
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