A Night Out

Justin and I rarely hire a sitter. The reasons for this are many...the cost of course, then there's the fact we really like to spend most of our time with our kiddos, plus a lack of fancy places that we go that require one. That's not to say we're never apart from our children. Kate has Sunday school and gymnastics, Gabby goes to the nursery at church, and both of the girls attend Moppets. We don't have trouble leaving them any of these places and generally they are so excited they don't even say good-bye when we leave. We've left our kids with friends or family for midwives appointments and even to have a little time off to see a movie or dinner, but the official sitter in our home is rather novel to our kids--the last time we had a sitter was when we went to the opening dinner of the year at the university 15 months ago.

Last night we had Justin's department Christmas party and the thought of wrangling all three children through that time, especially since one of them is a rather demanding nursing infant we opted for a sitter for the girls. We got a gal from church to keep them.

We enjoyed our evening of not having to chase anyone or having to remind someone to use a quiet voice. When we got home, the young lady told us the girls were well behaved and the only incident was that Kate cried when she went to bed because she missed us.

The story I got this morning was a little different. Over breakfast Kate started telling me about their evening. We had the girls ready for bed before we left. There were about 45 minutes until the girls were due to be in bed--this is important because you need to keep in mind that's all the time that Kate had to pull off this feat.

My children who are on a pretty strict schedule convinced the sitter that they needed a snack. They never have a snack after dinner. At least it was a banana.

Then Kate got the sitter to put on a video. So there went 30 minutes. Kate knows that she's not supposed to watch TV at night. She will even tell you, "Your brain will run out your ears if you watch too much TV." Thank you to my husband for teaching her that lovely phrasology.

She also convinced her sitter that she's allowed to do somersaults on her bed. She got extra stories because of her crying.

Now I know kids will try to get away with things and none of it individually was that bad, but the fact she did all that in such a short amount of time is somewhat scary! After all that 'fun' she tells me she doesn't want us to leave her with a sitter again because she missed us. What will I do with this girl?!