Babysitting: tricks and tales of the trade

“Some good activities to do with them are color, play board games, play school, play imagination (pretend we are different things), go outside, play hide and seek and read books. The easiest way to keep them entertained is to always have different ideas of stuff to do and always be energetic so they don’t get bored”

“You have to constantly have them playing something otherwise that’s when they start causing trouble. If they ever do start causing trouble, you can’t give ground if they start arguing with you, because they will try and test your limits. And that’s really them being mean, they’re just kids, that’s how they are. I would say to get to know the kids and figure out whether they like crafts an...

“The babysitter we have really does interact with them; they play games, go outside and do activities that the kids like to do. Whenever my wife and I leave the house and tell the kids that the same babysitter is coming to watch them, they get really excited, as opposed to someone that just sits on their phone the whole time. The kids always tell us if the sitter is on her phone the whole time or ...

“[On] one time I was babysitting, I put the kids in bed. I was going downstairs and they suddenly jumped on me, [and] I twisted my ankle. I still made them go to bed and the mom came home. She found out when she got home.”

“I was babysitting 6 and 8-year-old one time. They were playing on the steps and one of them fell down stairs. Instead of crying as you think he would, he got up and pushed his brother down the stairs, so they were both on the floor and started wrestling. The brother was mad that he got pushed downstairs.”

“I was babysitting this 3-year-old girl. We were drawing a picture of Cinderella. I thought she would be really bad at drawing because she was little, so I did a really bad job of [drawing] to not let her feel bad. [But], she drew a really good one and my picture looked so bad compared to hers. When her parents came home, they were like ‘oh my gosh, look at this.’ She didn’t realize that mine ...

“I was babysitting my brother and it was a really nice day outside, so we decided to walk to the gas station. I had to take a stroller with him. When we got to the gas station, we walked down the aisle to get some water and snack for him, and while buckled on the stroller, he reached his arms and ended up knocking down half of the stuff on the aisle off the shelves. I had to pick them all up while...

“[The girl that I babysat] said that she wouldn’t go to bed until her wiggly tooth came out. She asked me to rip it out, so I pulled the tooth out from her. She was 9. The parents were glad that it finally came out and that the tooth fairy could come that night.”

“One time I was babysitting this kid and I went to put him up to bed. He was probably around 4. He opened up his sheets, and there was a half-eaten apple in his bed. As I was reading him a story, he pulled out another fresh apple from his covers and started eating that one and handed it to me. He was hiding apples in his bed. There were four apples, so I put them on his dresser because I didn’t ...