Babysitting etiquette

This is meant to put a smile on your face and maybe even make you laugh. I live with my mother. She is the girls' achievement day leader. She has 15 girls in her achievements day. Her lesson this last week was on the do's and don'ts of babysitting. Or in other words teaching these young girls (soon to be old enough to babysit) how to be a good babysitter. Mom and I sat down and wrote up about 30 scenarios of things that might possibly happen when they babysit. The girls would chose a situation and talk about how they would handle the situation. Things like "What would you do if the toilet overflowed?" "What would you do if a child broke a glass on the kitchen floor?" Situations like that. Things that in reality they might possibly run into. Now for the humorous part. One of the situations was "What would you do if one of the children cut another child's hair?" One of the 8 year olds just about jumped out of her seat, so excited, waving her arm in the air because she had an answer to the question. Her answer was "I would just cut it some more and reshape it". This coming from an 8 year old. Another question "What would you do if a child wrote on the wall with a permanent marker?" A 10 year old answered that she would just move the furniture around and put something in front of it so it couldn't be seen. I told my mother that she did the community a HUGE service by teaching these girls how to be better babysitters and not letting them lose with their own ideas of how to handle problems. I still laugh when I think about the babysitter wanted to cut some more of the hair and re-shape it. Melody

Very cute girls! Makes me think of an incident in a Utah Ward west of SLC were we lived, when my oldest daughter was starting to babyset. One of the girls in the ward, had a bad habit of opening the icecream carton, obviously the fold type, and eating the icecream from both ends of the carton. She somehow felt that it wouldn't be noticed as quickly that she had eaten so much of the icecream. Sadly the poor child ended up with a weight problem. This particular ward, was a new subdevision, so lots of young couples with small children. Very few girls old enough to babyset, and I for one was one of the really old mothers in the neighborhood, as I had not had my first child till thirty. My children were used to having very basic home cooked food. As a result, they didn't like to eat things from packages, like mac and cheese, Hamberger Helper. My daughter would call home, ask what I was cooking, and have me bring her dinner to her. She said she wasn't eating the junk she had to feed the kids, in those folks homes. As the result of this kind of thing, we learned that if you don't feed a kid foods with preservatives in them when they are young, they won't want them when they grow up. And I assure you, her children eat almost entirely home cooked food as well. So learning to cook good home cooked food, is probably one of the best things that I ever learned, as well as having quality, the budget does so much better in the longrun, goes a lot farther, and this comes from a woman who raised five children on an Enlisted Mans income. Linda in Texas