Babysitting And Being Had

I love my brother Alvin, but he has a bad habit of asking me for favors without a scrap of warning. Today he called me to see if I would babysit for him tonight. I don't mind doing this but I'm in the Bronx and he lives in Jersey. This is normally about a 40 minute drive but on a day with a home game...

I asked him if he would bring the kids my way since he was going to be in the city. He whined and said it would be too difficult because it would take him across the game traffic and he had to be in the city. I reminded him that I would have to go through the same gnarly traffic as well. He whined and made me feel bad, but I resisted. Then he put munchkin #3 on the phone (I have no resistance against the power of the cuteness). Bastard!

So my Mom and I went out to watch the two Munchkins (#3 and #6). Despite the two hour traffic to get there, most of the evening went really smoothly. I read to the kids. They like when I do that because I do voices when I read :). They ate dinner without giving me much of a problem. We watched Robots and The Incredibles and had some popcorn. They even let me pull them away from the TV for bath time and that's as far as the good behavior went. As soon as they were in their jammies and tucked in, the eldest began to cry. He was doing the big heaving crying which made the little one start bawling too. Oh lord! I called in the reinforcements. I separated them and brought the eldest downstairs to get him some water and have him calm down. My Mom rocks so she had babygirl out cold in about ten minutes. Number 3 was not going down without a fight. I told him he would get five more minutes downstairs then he had to go back up quietly. Five minutes later, he hadn't stopped crying and was now saying he wasn't feeling well. He said his eye hurt and kept rubbing his head. He and I have seasonal allergies, so I figured he was getting a sinus headache. I got him a warm towel to put on his head and put in his eye drops and had him lie down on the couch with me and watch the movie till he fell asleep. I would have given him a decongestant but I wasn't sure when his last dose was.

He was still wide awake when his parents came home. Stella (his mom) told me that she gave him his allergy meds before they left and that I had been had. He just wanted more TV time and was playing the sympathy card. Sigh... the damn power of the cuteness got me once again.