Babysitting the Grandchildren on a Saturday Night (Blog 235)

Married couples go through various stages in their lives together.  The Saturday date night when we are young, the Saturday night baths when the kids start coming, the Saturday night waiting for the kids to come home stage, and the empty nester period.  Now after nearly 38 years of marriage, Elaine and I had the Babysitting the Grandchildren on a Saturday Night experience last night.

The evening began around 4:00 when we arrived to babysit Sam, who will be three in June, and Eli, who will be one in April.  Elaine's game plan was for her to work mostly with Sam while my task was to take care of Eli.  Eli only began crawling a fortnight or so ago, but already he has metamorphosed from someone who seemingly had to think about putting one hand in front of another to someone who is aggressively scooting about.

Matters went reasonably well until it was time for us to put our respective grandsons to bed.  Elaine read and talked to Sam, who quickly and willingly settled down and went to sleep.  I was not as successful with Eli.  The bottle feeding went well as Eli drank almost an entire one.

Then it was time for the rocking and singing stage.  I have a terrible singing voice and really only know one tune, "You Are My Sunshine" which I used to sing to our kids Sarah and Mark when they were toddlers.

After about 30 renditions of "You Are My Sunshine," I deemed Eli ready to be placed in his bed.  He was not ready and let me know so with loud sobs.  This resulted in more rocking and more choruses of the tune and another trip to the bed, which led to more sobs, though they were not as loud this time.

Finally, Elaine entered the room and told me to let him "work it out on his own," so I left.  In about five minutes, as we could tell from the monitor, Eli was asleep.  So I guess I did okay after all.