My recent calling to the Primary has caused be to reflect on for the lack of children in my life for the last four months. Sure I had the occasional exposure to a baby (such as Lydia, the star of last week's post), but nothing like my time in Berlin, where I babysat the professor's three children. Since I hope to catch up on some of my travels in this blog as well as my current state, this post is about my time as the American nanny in Berlin.
A little bit about the Farland children, Carrie, Guy and Basti. The oldest at eight is Carrie. Her mother once said to me "I didn't realize how unusual Carrie was until my third child. I thought every three-year-old had a favorite opera aria!" That opera aria happens to be from The Magic Flute, which she still enjoys. Carrie and I have known each other a long time, from when we were in Vienna on study abroad together in 2002. At that time she deemed me "better than an aunt" because I didn't have spanking privileges like my dear friend and her aunt Betsy did. At that time we also philosophized together on just what "romantic" is, which she decided was jumping naked into alpine lakes. I'm not sure she's wrong. Maddie also on that trip started her tradition of dying her hair in Europe, which she continued this time around by dying it purple with Matt.
A little more grown up Carrie enjoys socializing, creating crafts, singing, thinking, imagining, defending truth and right (especially from Will, more on that later) and most of all reading. She also enjoyed confessing things to me, as illustrated:
The Carrie Confessional:
M: Usually Mom and Dad sit on the balcony and drink tea and sing to us. Its pretty annoying.
C: One time Liam and I sat in Mom and Dad's room and shut all the doors and thought of all the bad words we could think of like poop, doo-doo . . .
C: Today my friend and I were playing on the balcony and we threw our shoes down to the lake and we told our parents that they accidentally fell but we threw them down on purpose.
C: As soon as dad leaves I'm going to take this flower out of the vase and smell it.
As the oldest child and the older sister, she's confident also that she is a wealth of knowledge for younger brothers, as she explained to Will while helping him put on his Halloween costume, that "Big sisters are big experts."
Guy took a little more time to warm up to me than Carrie, but he revealed to me in the following conversation that took place shortly after we got to Berlin, that I and my family was ok:
W: You're pretty weird.
S: Oh?
G: Yeah, but your kinda cool. (pause) You're like one of my favorite babysitters. I like Caroline too.
S: I know Caroline (assuming that he's talking about Caroline). She's pretty nice.
G: Well I HOPE you know Caroline (meaning Carolyn, my sister)! She's like your little sister!
Guy's stories often start rather simply, plainly, lulling you into mediocrity and then he hits with the fantastical. To answer the question "what did you do at school", he might say something like "Well, first we colored butterflies. I colored mine blue. Then we had recess. And then the ninja came in through the roof so I threw a bomb at him."
Carrie often rolls her eyes at him and also often feels a moral duty to point out to him and others that he is lying. This brings fierce denials from Will and then one is left with the difficult task of separating children in a metropolitan apartment.
But I had good conversations with Will, even if they tended to surprise me, like this one about the birds and the bees:
G: They have this really cool toy at church. I could show it to you but its at church.
S: Is it in the nursery?
G: Yeah; you'd have to have a kid to go there. But I guess your going to have one.
S: (surprised) I am?
G: Yea, with Matt or something.
S: Oh, yeah, we'll probably have a baby sometime.
G: Yeah, sometime, and then its dad - I guess I mean Matt - can take it down the waterslide at Seven Peaks and then they can tell you all about it.The youngest child is then two-year-old Basti X. I think the proper, supreme court justice names of the older children must have gotten to Rob and Mary Ann because many people think they went off the deep end with Basti, as they call him. Although I will admit I was skeptical of the name at first, its quite grown on me, in part because its unusual but still a real name (not some combo of the parents names or where he was conceived) and also because I'm looking forward to the day when he's a GA and we can hear from Elder Basti X. Farland - how cool is X for a middle initial?
But I digress. Basti is a sweetheart and too darn cute. He loves ketchup, "Cars da moofie", Thomas the tank engine, playing with Will, singing with Carrie, taking medicine and protesting sleep. He was also delighted to find the bidet in the apartment bathroom - finally a sink just his size!
All the kids slept in the same room, but he and Carrie rather refused to sleep and managed to keep each other up. This meant that often he sat out in the living room with me while Carrie and Guy fell asleep. We would play with toys or read stories or he would watch the German Mr. Rogers with Matt.
I would be amiss if I did not describe the Farland children's favorite pastime with me: poker! Sometime early in the babysitting, Carrie mentioned she didn't know what "poker face" meant. I explained it and they wanted to know if I knew how to play poker. If my life were a movie, here would be inserted a black and white flashback of a very young me playing cards with my grandpa and drinking root beer and calling out cheers. Now back to the color present, I told them yes, I could play poker.
They insisted that I teach them. Our first problem was finding something to bet with. This is when Guy suggested we draw money and Carrie expanded on it by suggesting we make rubbings of the Euro coins. While we worked on this, I explained to them a little bit about poker, including that we would start by ante-ing into the pot. Carrie said "Don't worry, we've got plenty of pots!" and immediately pulled a big cooking pot out of the cupboard. To make it more interesting Carrie hid the pot and gave us a map so we could find it. Carrie also folded us money clips for our crayon coins and bills. We then preceded to play one card stud with rather unorthodox betting rules. Basti even got to join in by being the keeper of the discard pile.
They liked it so much that it became a little ritual with us - drawing and cutting out money, putting it in our clip, hiding and finding the pot, and finally playing poker, either one card stud or Mexican poker (which Carrie dubbed Minnehaha) or if we needed a change, go fish.
So I admit that I was something of a corrupting influence on these children. But Basti paid me a big compliment the other day apparently. He told his parents he wanted to go back to Berlin. When they asked them what he wanted to do in Berlin, he said "Have a babysitter." ahhh!
1 comment:
Cheers to the new apostle! Dad
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