Betsy's First Time Babysitting

Newsletter 2021-01-11

New parents care about the wrong milestones. First-timers can’t wait for their babies to walk and talk, until their kids actually do walk and talk, at which point those same parents just wish their kids would sit still and shut up. It’s the circle of life. The one big milestone parents should actually look forward to is potty training. Not the process itself, which my wife, Lola, and I somehow got worse at with each subsequent kid, but the total completion of it. We had our oldest potty trained before she was three, while, with our youngest, we worried she might still be in diapers in college. I thought the day Waffle was finally capable of wiping her own butt would be the happiest day of my life. And it was. My wedding day and the births of all four of my kids don’t even come close. But the second-best child milestone happened this weekend: My ten-year-old babysat her sisters for the first time. Let the exploitation of free child labor begin.

I can’t tell you how long I’ve been lookin…