Dad Is Fat (18 page)

Choosing a babysitter that is not a family member is one of the real struggles of parenting. Who to hire? Are they attentive? Do they have a criminal record? Eventually you become more lax in your approach. “Do you have a pulse? We’ll be home around ten.”

Of course, I’m joking. Kind of. With more children comes a greater need for help. As you add more and more children to the mix, the price goes up as the babysitting pool diminishes and you become more efficient at selecting a babysitter. For instance, the necessity of speaking English shrinks dramatically. The following is an actual conversation I had with a babysitter.

I wish I was exaggerating. We once had a non-English-speaking babysitter from Guatemala who I’m pretty sure didn’t even speak Spanish. Someone who doesn’t know English shouldn’t be watching my children, you say? In any small business, like parenting five children, it is necessary that you place the right people where their assets can be most useful in order to run a successful operation. Sometimes all the training a babysitter needs is having been a good mother herself. I don’t care if some early childhood education grad student has taken
twelve infant CPR classes, it will never replace the experience of a sitter who has raised her own well-adjusted children. No English is required for this position.

Let me familiarize you with some of my other categories of babysitters.

I never said these categories would be flattering. When you have five kids, it’s completely necessary to have a warm body to sit at your house while you are gone for a short while. When children are asleep, we have no problem leaving them with the Warm Body sitting in our living room while we go out and do shows in Manhattan for a couple of hours. They are literally a baby-sitter. Well, when they are not going through our stuff.

This type of sitter is ideal for pickups and drop-offs because they know the NYC subway system, and your kids think they are some cool aunt from the Disney Channel. However, if you try to leave them with your kids at night, be prepared to pay eighteen dollars an hour for someone who will be texting their boyfriend constantly, and your computer history will show that they were checking in on Facebook more often than checking in on your kids. You will likely come home to an empty fridge and a sink full of dishes, and they will ditch you for the first unpaid NYU student film they can book.

Initially I was hesitant to have another man babysit my kids. What if he is better with my kids than I am? What if he is worse with my kids than I am? I’ve grown to love it. It’s really awesome to have a guy watch your kids. He can carry the stroller and a kid up five flights with no complaint and will keep them outside and active all day. You will not care at all that he does not clean or organize the diaper bag, because after all, he’s a dude! Just the fact that he is a guy that can stand to be around other people’s kids is amazing to me.

It was love at first sight when you saw this babysitter interacting with other kids at the park. You immediately poached her from the family she was working for by offering her more money. This babysitter does it all. She’s warm and reads stories and plays dress-up and cooks and cleans and is part teacher, part best friend. She knows all the names of the different X-Men. Your kids love her, and she will eventually get poached by a richer family at the park. Karma. Note: If you met your wife while she was married to another man, history is bound to repeat itself.

This babysitter will be amazing at first, and you will keep increasing her responsibilities. You will become completely dependent on her, and she will be an integral part of your daily routine and schedule. Inevitably, she will get involved in gossiping with the other sitters at the park and find out that someone makes more money for fewer kids or gets a MetroCard or federal holidays off (when there is no school and you need someone the most). Then when you have your busiest week with your most important deadline, she will threaten to quit unless she immediately receives all the aforementioned perks, and you are forced to give in to all of her demands. Of course, she will always hold one of the demands back and save it for the next time you are in a position of weakness.

This babysitter will always be going through some personal crisis and make you feel as if you somehow had something to do with it. They will interrupt you during a business phone call to inform you that they found some mess that your kids made instead of just cleaning it up. They will create drama with any other babysitter that you hire to fill in when you need someone extra. The Attention Seeker will have some really positive attributes to justify you keeping her around, but eventually it becomes too much to bear, because your kids are also attention seekers and there is not enough attention to go around as it is.

The irony of the babysitting situation is that you need someone to watch your kids while you go out to earn the money to pay someone to take care of your kids. Your ultimate goal by earning the money is to be able to spend quality time with your kids, which is what you are paying your babysitter to do. The babysitting thing is my own personal Sisyphus story of endlessly rolling the rock up the hill and watching it roll back down. It’s actually your fault, really, because you made me write this book so you could read it. How selfish of you!

Living in a tiny two-bedroom apartment with five children makes bedtime a logistical nightmare. We have two single beds in the kids’ room and one king in our master bedroom. No, these aren’t big rooms. Think breadbox, but smaller. There is a crib in each of these rooms and also a crib on prominent display in the middle of our living room / office / dining room / kitchen because we love to show off our crib. (Pun intended.) We have three cribs. We have so many cribs, we should be on that show
Cribs
. Or at least in pun jail.

Given the number of children we have, bedtime must occur in waves. Babies (newborn and one-year-old) are placed in cribs, one in the kids’ room and one in the master.

Then the hard part commences: the coordinating of teethbrushing and using the bathroom with the big three. Once teeth are cleaned and everyone uses the potty, there is cuddling and stories with the big three, and then, out of necessity, the most raucous one is temporarily placed in our bed in the
master, which has now become the “holding cell.” If you are keeping track at home, we have three kids in one room and two in the other.

Now you may be wondering, why don’t we have bunk beds? We learned with our first two kids that bunk beds are great except when a two-year-old crawls up to the top bunk, jumps, and falls on her face. We finally got rid of the bunk beds when we started to be on a first-name basis with the receptionist at the ER. Back to the present scenario. After the kids are in their secure location, I will run out and do a show or two. Jeannie will do whatever she does to hold our lives together. This part of the evening is known as a quasi “intermission.” After I come back, Act II begins. Jeannie and I will do work, write, and try to maintain some semblance of a grown-up relationship. This all takes place in the living room, where there are no kids.

As you can see, we have made optimal use of the apartment. We have all the children snug in each of our beds. You may wonder where Jeannie and I sleep, since all the beds are occupied. This could be a major conflict. Begin Act III. If Jeannie and I plan to read or watch television in bed (which is every night, by the way), then a “transfer” must occur. The child that is in our bed must be moved into one of the singles with one of the other kids. Then the baby that is in our room must be moved from the crib in our room to the crib that is in the now quiet and dark living room / dining room / office / kitchen.