My Disastrous Attempt At Babysitting In Rhode Island
- Konrad Tillman
- Jul 8
- 3 min read
Intro
After a decent redeye onboard United Airlines from Los Angeles to Boston, I had the privilege of babysitting my five-year-old niece for the next 2 days. I’ve never been good around kids as a whole, not because I am not good around kids, but always because I feel like I am going to screw up. However, I really do love my niece and treasure every moment I get to spend with her.
So without further ado, feel free to laugh at me as much as you want 😅.
BTW, my mum was there driving, but mainly working constantly, hence the looking after part mainly fell on me.
The First Part
I think one of the best things to do with kids is to keep them active and minimize screen time. So, when I heard that my niece had a soccer game on the first day of babysitting, I decided that we should head there extra early to get in some practice. So far, so good. Right?
Well, it was all going well, her team was up one goal, until she took a ball straight to the face. You see, as a first-time babysitter, what do I do here? Do I go out and try to comfort her while crying, or do I let the coach handle it? Like a dumb buffoon, I froze up, and thankfully the coach saved the day.
Okay, I thought, it hasn’t been that bad yet, right?
After the game, my niece was begging me to go to Five Guys, and even though I can’t eat due to my nut allergy, I agreed. Well, as it would turn out, my allergy is airborne and I found that out today at Five Guys 🤦♂️. Great, thankfully, I had some Benadryl quickly, and the reaction died down, but I tried not to let my niece see. She goes through enough (which I am not going to explain here), that she doesn’t need to see someone have an allergic reaction.
Don’t worry, she enjoyed her Five Guys… Just outside…
The Second Part
Arriving back home, I shamefully decided to put her in front of the TV for a couple of hours. I felt like she had been active enough today, and we would play some card games before dinner, as well as the fact I had a lot of work that needed to be done due to enrolling in 18 credits and exams coming up the week after 🥴.
Not knowing what she likes to eat, I headed out to Whole Foods, bought some juicy strip steaks, and we ended up having some fantastic steaks for dinner. I’m not a great cook, but steak is one of the few things I can really do, and my niece loved it!
Tucking her in for bed around 8:30, and of course, reading a bedtime story (the night before Christmas), she was out for the night after a high-activity day.
The next day, we ate Starbucks together for breakfast (I know, I’m not an angel), took her to swim, and ended up having ice cream before my babysitting duties were finished.
The Moral Of The Story
While I am writing this story about babysitting on a travel blog, there are two deeper underlying messages that transcribe into a life of traveling.
Be unconformable. Oftentimes, especially in travel, we are satisfied with being comfortable when we should be pushing ourselves to the limit. The only that we grow as humans is when we are uncomfortable and remaining in discomfort. I wasn’t exactly comfortable going to babysit my niece, but it taught me a lot. I’m actually in the early stages of writing a book titled, “comfortably uncomfortable”, so we’ll see how that goes.
The second moral of the story is: family first. No matter if you have a trip booked or something else on the Horizon, family should always come first. Family was never a big part of my life, the only person I am somewhat close to is my mum, and even so, my sister called me and I was there immediately. Before that, we hadn’t spoken in over a year… So yeah, be grateful for who you have in your life, even if it’s not reciprocated.
Final Thoughts
Part 1 of babysitting my niece was an absolute disaster 😅. While I hope you had a good chuckle reading this, I was completely lost with always trying to do the right thing with my niece that I ended up having an allergic reaction 🤦♂️. The moral of the story: do sh*t you don’t want to, in order to be better at the sh*t you do want to do…
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