Babysitting

When I was younger, there were two traditional ways for teenagers to make some extra money. For guys, it was doing some yard work. For girls, it was babysitting. Actually, just so that this doesn’t sound sexist, by the time that I was a teenager, either sex was doing those jobs…but they were still the stand-bys.

Apparently, that’s no longer the case. I’m not sure how kids these days make money, but I can tell you that it’s not by babysitting. At least not in the town that I live in.

After being yelled at by my doctor for both the schedule I keep and my stress level – lots of stuff about, “You’re going to have a heart attack,” blah, blah, blah, “Do you mind if I ask your wife out after you’re dead?,” yadda, yadda, yadda – I decided that perhaps Amy and I should try to go out for an evening. We rush around like crazy people most of the time and we’re almost never by ourselves…every so often, it just seems like a good idea.

So, I tried to have Amy find a babysitter. We live in a small town where a lot of people know each other. It didn’t seem like it would be that hard. I figured, at this point, we should be able to find a local teenager that we know one way or another to do the job. That’s when I found out that teenagers are now too busy to do menial jobs like babysitting. Unless you’re offering a standing gig, guaranteeing 20 hours per week and paying more than $10 per hour, they’re not even going to discuss it.

(The same applies to lawn care. Every summer, I try to find some kid to mow either my yard or the lawn at the theater and every year I find out that the kids charge just as much as a professional lawn care service.)

That left us scrambling to find any other parents that would be willing to have our kids spend a couple of hours at their house. That’s not a whole lot easier as it turns out. The other parents are just as busy as us and the teenagers are.

We finally found someone to take the kids, but it was just long enough for us to go grab a bite at an Applebee’s a couple of towns over. Then, when we arrived to get the kids, the boys pitched a fit because they hadn’t gotten to watch “Halloween 3” yet. These are the same kids that believe “Harry Potter” is a horror movie and that “Casper the Friendly Ghost” is too scary. There was apparently some confusion over the name Michael Myers…with my sons figuring that just meant it starred the guy from “Wayne’s World” and “The Cat in the Hat.”

This has been an on-going issue for Amy and I ever since we had children. You barely need more than one hand to count the number of times that either of our children has spent an entire night without us. I know people that ship their kids off to the grandparents or a sibling every other weekend. We struggle to just have an uninterrupted meal.

Apparently, this is why people live close to family members. The nearest family members that we have that would be able to watch the kids live at least two hours away. It was easier to get out-of-work actor friends in LA to watch Marty when he was little then it is to find someone that can watch kids in America’s heartland. Here, everybody else has at least as many kids or grandkids as we do and don’t really want our kids. In L.A., within certain circles, kids are kind of a novelty.

It just seems like it should be easier. Every time I hear one of those relationship specialists saying that couples should schedule time alone with each other, I want to throttle them.

Even better, one of the Nickelodeon channels that the boys watch keeps showing an ad for a website called CollegeInPJs.com that is supposed to help young adults find online college options. Well, as soon as they saw it, both of my son’s exclaimed, “I want to go to college in my PJ’s!”

I now want to throttle the people that run that website as well. If the boys are still living with us when they’re 25, I swear to God that I will hunt those people down and sue the living daylights out of them.