And this is why...

Do moms ever get to call it babysitting, when they watch their own kids? A lot of dads do, and always as if it is a special sort of sacrifice. Babysitting is not the same as 'watching your kids'. You can babysit while doing very little watching.

Well, yesterday I was 'babysitting' Gabe. You will agree that it was babysitting - and this is why:

We had this Halloween paint high in a cabinet in the bathroom. He is learning to pee in a toilet (and doing a very good job) and he is at a stage right now where he will go in and try to pee every couple of minutes because he gets a lot of praise for peeing in the potty. So I was letting him go into the bathroom on his own quite a bit. When I went in to check on him he was standing on the counter next to the sink. You can see what a great kid he is, now see if you can count how many surfaces have face paint on them.

On the topic of babysitters not keeping an eye on the kids - When I was a little bit bigger than Gabe is now my dad was remodeling a room in the basement of the house we lived in. I saw him use hammers, saws, nails - everything. He knocked down a wall and was combining two rooms into one. Well, about that time he and my mom went out and left us with a babysitter. I went into my room with a hammer and knocked a single hole in the wall. It was one hole that extended the length of the entire wall around the room at the height of a four year old. When my parents arrived home the babysitter didn't even know I had done it.

I sure do love Gabe, but I am glad that the most we do around the house is decorate for holidays and no major repair work that he could try to replicate on his own. ^_~

me

Oh, and by the way, Gabe was a vampire for Halloween so he had a white face with black around the eyes and red on the mouth. I think that he did a really good job trying to copy that idea. It looks like he is sucking boogers and not blood this time though. LOL.