Smile! You're on Nanny Camera!

I received a rather odd phone call tonight. My parents actually took the call, as it came to the land line. The call was from the father of two children (and a two-month-old niece) that I had  babysat one night in early January when the two couples went out for dinner and a movie with Scott and Jillian. The man's brother  and sister-in-law (or sister and brother-in-law; I can't even remember which) brought their baby to the house of the two little boys so that one babysitter could manage all three kids. The baby was young enough to sleep comfortably virtually anywhere. Both couples paid me, so I wasn't taken advantage of financially.

Many homes with young children are now equipped with nanny cams. I'm a little surprised after the fact that this one was, as the mother is a stay-at-home mom, and they  rarely have babysitters, as the woman has a mother and four sisters who live within easy driving distance who do the vast majority of their babysitting, and the couple supposedly only rarely goes out without their two little boys, anyway.

I don't know exactly when the couple got around to spying on me through their nanny cams, which are apparently strategically posed all over the house. The father is sort of an amateur techie; I can see him being far more creative than buying one of those teddy bears that everyone  recognizes and would not be fooled  by in the least.  It's been just about seven weeks since I babysat there. Maybe they have twenty of the devices, and it took them a long time, even fast-forwarding,  to get through the footage from all the nanny cams. Or perhaps they saw it a long time ago and just got around to calling. Or maybe the wife saw it relatively soon after but didn't think to show it to her husband -- the one who was most concerned or intrigued by the footage.

Some nanny cams just have video. This couple, with their amateur techie status, of course,  would  have to have audio on theirs as well as video. One would want to know if a babysitter was cursing at the baby as she was beating him, I would suppose.

I've never known for a fact that my image was ever before caught by a nanny cam, and had never given a great deal of worry to the prospect, but my friends and I had long discussed it in terms of  how it would be uncool for anyone to have footage of one of us picking our  noses or adjusting wedgies, or any other such thing on camera, preserved for posterity, or perhaps even posted on YouTube. (I'd like to think anyone with sufficient stature in life to be a parent for whose children I would babysit  -- I'm picky -- would be above such pubescent behavior, but one can never know for certain.). The idea of worrying about being seen stealing the homeowners' possessions, much less harming or even being unkind to a child, isn't something to which I've ever given  a moment's thought. If I didn't want to be around children, I wouldn't babysit. The essence of the matter is that even when the parents pay generously as babysitting wages go, it's not very much money involved. If someone doesn't enjoy babies or children,  much more lucrative ways of earning money can be found.

My friends had brought up the idea of nanny cam abuse, as in strategic placement in a bathroom in order to photographically catch nubile young females in states of partial nudity. I have no doubt that such happens, and again, maybe I'm naive about my clientele, but before I was eighteen, my parents were practically OCD-cautious about anyone for whom I babysat. I didn't do all that much childcare anyway, as I was busy with sports, and I had enough musical gigs, including one that was technically a half-time job, that my time was more valuable to me than the wages I would have earned from babysitting. Still, I did some sitting, but only for families my parents knew well and trusted.  When I took care of the children from the two young families in Utah in January, even though I had already turned eighteen,  Scott and Jillian would never have allowed me to take the job had they not known all the parents well enough to trust them thoroughly.

I didn't answer the phone when it rang even though it was within easy reach of the recliner in which I was sitting because I never answer the home phone on principle. It's never for me anyway-- my friends reach me by cell phone -- and I choose for the most part not to function as my parents' receptionist.  They were mildly hostile to my laziness at first, but their attitudes eventually improved to within an acceptable range.  They have an actual answering machine. Why should they require a human answering machine as well? My father answered the telephone when it rang tonight. He vocally considered letting the answering machine get it (my father thinks only out loud, so everyone within hearing range of him knows every single thought that ever pops into his head) , as he didn't recognize the number but thought that chances were good that it was one of our many Utah relatives, and as likely as not, the person wanted money. On a whim, he took the call anyway.

I don't pay a great deal of attention to my parents when they're talking on the phone because 99.9999% of the time whatever they're saying is almost terminally boring, but the third time my name was mentioned in my father's end of the conversation, my interest was piqued.  I was able to decipher from the context who it was with whom my dad was speaking.. Hearing one end of a phone conversation is similar at times to putting together a jigsaw  puzzle. Sometimes a puzzle doesn't go together just right at first. My initial thought was that I had been accused of wrongdoing of some sort. My mother, too, had grown concerned by the single end of the conversation she was hearing, and picked up an extension to the phone.

Facial expressions and tones of voice gradually changed, and my dad handed his extension of the phone to me. What the man told me was that  his wife had reviewed the nanny cam tapes. He came up with the not-terribly-credible excuse that he and his wife review the nanny cam videos because everyone always tells them that their boys behaved well, but they want to see if such is really the case, because they like to hold them --especially the older boy -- accountable for their behavior while the children are in the care of others, Whatever. I suppose it was more diplomatic than coming right out and saying, "We wanted to see if you were a child-beater or a pervert or a thief." For that matter, maybe he was telling the truth.

Anyway, the man said his wife had been telling him for weeks that there was a part of the video he should see and hear. She said it wasn't urgent and could wait until he had time. Last night he had time.

The two little boys - one a seven-year-old  and one a two-year-old -- went to bed relatively easily. There were the usual requests for just one more story and another drink of water, but as boys of those ages go, they fell asleep quite quickly. I gave the baby girl what was to be her last bottle of breast milk, burped her,  rocked her for  a few minutes, then put her into the portable crib that was set up in the living room. She cried. I gently rubbed her tummy for a few minutes, then gave her a brief time to soothe herself to sleep, but her cries grew louder and more distressed. I didn't want her to wake the boys, and I didn't want to ignore an obviously uncomfortable baby.  I picked her up and check her diaper, which was fine.  I gently burped her again for a few more minutes, which produced a slight belch though nothing all that impressive.  As I was holding her and patting her back, I began to sing a really lame Josh Groban song to her, I  have no idea why I chose the particular song; it just popped into my head. She must be a  fan of Josh Groban's music, because she was asleep by the time I finished the song. I very carefully placed her back  into the portable crib, and that was the last I heard from her all night, other than the soft sounds of her breathing and the sweet little sucking noises she made. I sat in a chair barely an arm's length from her, so I could hear her without even getting up to check.  About two hours after she went to sleep , the couples returned and I went home with Scott and Jillian.

The father of the two boys, whose nanny cams captured all the action, is a professional musician. He composes and arranges music for movies, although he does a few other odd projects on the side.  He found the footage of my singing to the baby "precious" (his word, not mine), and said  I have a very sweet voice. He wants to use me for the vocals (just the singing; the dialogue will be done by someone else who apparently doesn't sing very well) for a cartoon feature for which he's composing and arranging the score. A little might be done during spring break,but the bulk of it will happen in June when I'm on summer break. (I'm not taking summer term classes.)

I will be paid, but not so much that I should be giving up  my day job if I actually had one. This is what I would consider a "Don't count your chickens before they hatch" situation, All sorts of things could come up which could cause this not to materialize. If it happens as planned, great. If something throws a wrench in the works, I'll have a little more time off this summer. I'm trying to look at it as a win-win situation.

And, even if there were no other consolation, at least the man didn't have his nanny cam set up in the bathroom in order to catch pornographic shots of me . . . or at least I think he didn't.

I should have been asleep hours ago, but the excitement is keeping me awake, and I have a father who does not want me to turn into a benzo addict, so I'm stuck with counting sheep. I hope I'm not still counting at 8:30 a.m. when the tele-conference is scheduled to begin.

Dobrou noc. [Czech for "good night," or what's left of it.]

They came, they stole our stuff, and they left.

The relatives -- my rather eccentric aunt and  uncle --left this morning after eating enough breakfast to sustain six ordinary people for at least two days. My mom said feeding the two of them enough that they didn't have to eat again at their own expense for the rest of the day was a very small price to pay to have them gone. She said by the time they finally got out the door and into their car, she would have gladly opened the pantry and refrigerator doors and told them to take whatever they could carry out in five minutes if they would just LEAVE.   Even though they don't particularly like us, they always bid their farewells and head for the door roughly twenty times before they make their bona fide departure.This time it was to the point that my dad whispered under his breath that if they weren't on their way within thirty minutes, he was passing out benzos to us and taking a handful himself. My dad may drink like a fish when the occasion merits it, and he may medicate me as though i'm a lab rat, but in terms of medicating himself with anything other than booze, whether over-the counter, prescription, or from your friendly street-corner dealer, he rarely takes as much as a Tylenol. the visit stressed him even more than it di me or my mom.

The second the relatives' car began forward motion, the inspection to calculate our losses began. We typically store extra supplies of anything that's normally kept in a bathroom in our bathrooms, and anything related to laundry in our laundry room, etc., but past practice was a clear indicator that our bathrooms and laundry rooms were the easiest targets for theft. My parents piled scads of food and paper products into their closet. My mom couldn't get to most of her clothing, so she had to wear jeans covered with dirt from when she was working in the yard yesterday along with one of my dad's shirts. Even so, she was only the third most tackily dressed person in the house this morning. Both my aunt and uncle appear to have forgotten somewhere around19 71 that fashion trends tend to shift  over time.My Aunt Heather, who is an extreme couponer, gave my parents a case of bath soap that irritated the skin of both my dad and my brother. In a more sane world, my mom would have just offered the soap to my aunt and uncle. My uncle, however, operates on some sort of system where he can't go to sleep at night until he has helped himself to a given quantity of someone else's belongings. The soap would not have counted in his quota had it been handed to him. Thus, we minimized our losses by hiding the soap where he would find it. Enabling a person in theft is morally questionable, but there was a need to be practical. Likewise, the sub-standard quality laundry detergent of which my Aunt Heather had a surplus and passed along to us we stored in a spot in the laundry room that Helen Keller wouldn't have missed. The final inventory check showed that we lost a few jars of jam and all of the open tissue boxes placed in bathrooms and living areas, in addition to the soap and laundry detergent. This was probably one of the least costly visits from my aunt and uncle that we've ever suffered.

Right now I'm at my pseudorelatives' house. I've been invited to spend the weekend with them. It would have been even nicer had the visit started a day earlier, but I shouldn't look inside the mouth of the proverbial gift horse.

On a totally unrelated note, it is fast approaching the time when mitt Romney and the Republican party must decide upon a vice-presidential candidate. Will they make as bizarre a selection as they did four years ago? i certainly hope so.

A Black Sheep in the Family, and It's Not I for a Change!

Uncle Mahonri, AKA "Runic Manhole" and "Hernia Column," has found himself in a bit of a quandary. A few months ago I wrote about his innovative budget-easing strategy of helping himself to household staples including but not limited to toothpaste and toilet paper from the supplies maintained by others. It seems that feminine hygiene products can be counted among the products Mahonri obtains gratis.

As a shipment of individually packaged disposable douche products, the brand of which was not disclosed (not that it really matters), was in the process of being delivered to a discount grocery store not far from Mahonri's home, Mahonri intercepted the delivery of a very large carton of the supplies. He loaded the windfall into his minivan and headed home with them. A store employee observed Mahonri's supermarket spree and jotted down his license plate number as he sped away. An hour or so later, local law enforcement showed up at Mahonri's home and located the incriminating empty carton. The contents had already been distributed to bathrooms throughout the family home, as well as to the family's two-year supply of food and essential items.

Mahonri is an employee of the church educational system. This presents a wee bit of a public relations debaucle for the church. The solution decided upon by the church was to proclaim a lapse in mental health, with a physiological cause at its root, as the real culprit. This behavior, according to a local church spokesperson (when a public relations fiasco arises, the church prefers to relegate it to the local levels of church administration)is totally out of character for Uncle Mahonri.

I don't know whether the spokeman is under-informed or is deliberately misleading the public. While, as I am not a professional in either the medical or mental health fields, I am far from qualified to comment on the state of my uncle's sanity (and, for that matter, I've always thought he had more than a few loose screws), whether the issue is one of mental health or one of moral turpitude, the behavior itself is far from recent in onset. When I was three years old, Mahonri helped himself to all the Band-Aids in my family's medicine cabinets. This was only one of my parents' many opportunities to involuntarily participate in Mahonri's creative five-finger-discount system.

The members of my extended family are following the church's lead and are deluding themselves into believing that this behavior is unusual for mahonri. This is sad as well as stupid. Each branch of the family knows fully well the lengths to which they have gone to lock up their food, paper products, printer ink, and anything else Mahonri might find worth his while to lift whenever he has visited any one of us. Faulty wiring in his hard drive or some sort of chemical imbalance may very well have led Mahonri to pilfer the what must surely add up to thousands of dollars worth of goods he has stolen in the years since he has been a part of my extnded family.

My extended family's habit of looking the other way contributed to the situation Uncle Mahonri is now facing. Many years ago my mother attempted to address this problem directly by first confronting Mahonri himself and then, when he reacted with hostility, by approaching Mahonri's wife and my grandparents. My grandparents refused to speak to her for more than a year following her one-woman attempt at staging an intervention. Had someone taken my mother seriously at the time, perhaps the family would not now be suffering such public humiliation.