Adventures in Babysitting

I found out a few weeks ago that my friend Karen was going to be in town for a grand total about about 24 hours, including last night! She’s a friend/roommate/classmate from Georgia Tech and you can find mention of her here, here, and here among other posts. These days she’s a professor at Tech, and one of her students just finished up their thesis work with a group here at JSC and was giving an outbrief yesterday afternoon. Obviously there would be dinner plans…but then Becca went and got us all a reservation at Underbelly, one of the current “hot” restaurants in Houston, and I didn’t want to make poor Jose miss out to stay home with Emma! The time had come to finally leave Emma with someone other than family or daycare!

Thankfully, Erin was willing to oblige. Emma and Keagan are only three months apart — Keagan’s the “older man” although we suspect Emma the chunkster actually outweighs him — and they already hang out at daycare every day. Erin and I have been saying for months that we should trade babysitting so that we can each go out every once in a while, but we hadn’t actually done it. Turns out that the thought of a nice dinner with a friend from out-of-town was what it took to finally spur me to call her bluff!

In a way, it was almost harder to leave Emma with a friend than it would have been with a random babysitter — and not for any logical reasons. Obviously I trusted Erin and her husband Cory to take great care of Emma for a few hours, and I was happy to know she’d be with her buddy Keagan. But I was also worried about really dumb things — like what if Emma gets upset and cries the whole night? Or what if she breaks their stuff? Or what if she won’t go to bed? These are things that I wouldn’t worry about if we were paying a babysitter because hey, that’s their job. But when it’s your friend doing the babysitting, you don’t want them to end up regretting it!

Fortunately, it sounds like everything went really well. They also happen to be dogsitting this week, and as soon as we put Emma down on the floor, she promptly started giggling and chasing the dog around the living room. I took that as a good sign and Jose and I scooted out of there pretty quickly to avoid notice while she was occupied with what she probably thought was a walking stuffed animal. She was sound asleep when we picked her up, and only cried a little bit when going to bed.