Adventures in Babysitting

Four year olds are cool. Four year old cousins are even cooler. They read books like "Room on the Broom" and "Nina, Nina, Ballerina" and think that getting to comb a "big-girl's" hair is just about the coolest thing ever imaginable. They think that having two pennies, three dimes and one quarter makes them a millionaire. They have imaginary friends with names like "U-why-ee" that eat nothing but birthday cake and spend Christmas frolicking with their other fairy-friends on exotic islands. They don't understand the concept of being "tired" and their favorite word is an empowering "NO!" When you come downstairs after telling them it's "time to go to sleep" and then you accidentally kick the rolling storage cart into their castle of blocks, they think it means that it's time to play again. When they refuse to be in their bedroom until the point you have to walk back up the stairs and take them there, and they smell on your breath that you've just finished off a Tootsie pop from the stash in the kitchen, they can tell you exactly what color you ate. When you keep getting interrupted by a little person who comes to the top of the stairs and shouts down claims that there is more time in this day to be capitalized upon, then you know you're having fun with a four year old. When you're riddled with guilt because you've just been forced to use your "mom-voice" and have instantaneously dropped from "Fun Cousin" status to "Meanest Cousin in the World" status due to your bedtime-politic, you know you've spent the evening with a four year old.

Reporting from the dark underworld of the House-After-Bedtime...over and out.