Aaron Watch: Days Five and Six

Aaron is no longer under my care after tonight.  That’s all I can say.

Also, in hindsight, I wish my fiancee could have seen how much of a trooper I have been.  Too bad she had to travel for work.

Aaron Watch: Day Four

Today was field trip day at Aaron’s camp.  Although I have no idea where they went, I know they sold candy.  His camp counselor let him buy way, way too much candy.  He came home with about half of it in his stomach and I’m holding the rest of it somewhere he cannot find.  Still, when he came home he became a blur.  Every object in his apartment and mine became of interest in him.  He pick up a number of expensive artifacts and then dropped each of them almost immediately in favor of another.  He’s already broken a glass vase that took an hour to clean up.  I then proceeded to follow him around, since sitting him down had been unsuccessful.

He is now finally calming down, but I have never seen a kid on a sugar high so extreme.  It must be that his mother does not allow candy.  Figures that he should choose to torment me.

Aaron Watch: Days One, Two and Three

I finally got my Internet connection back tonight.  I called once each the past two days and received nothing but grief from the cable company technical support hot-line.  But that has not been a big issue, given that Aaron has been a handful.  The first day he was mostly quiet, after he came home from camp he read his book.  I left him to get the mail and came back to find him hiding a dirty magazine behind his book.  I naturally took it, there was an argument, and it ended off with a chilling remark, “Well, fine.  There’s more where that came from anyway.”  With that he locked himself in his room and I could not even get him out for dinner.

The next morning, yesterday, I banged on the door and yelled through it for twenty minutes and he finally opened it, looking groggy.  I silently pushed him along, knowing he had been up all night doing God knows what.  I was an hour late for work because of him.  What tops it all off is that after camp, he pestered me with the question “where do babies come from?” all afternoon.  Wouldn’t he have learned that from the porno magazines?  I dodged the question anyway.

Does not matter, though, because today took the cake.  I had the gall to leave him alone while I picked something up from the office.  When I came back the kitchen had already seen two disasters.  The first disaster is spaghetti sauce and Parmesan cheese all over the counter top.  The second is a pile of neatly thrown pukeon the tiled floor.  My kitchen smells like a one-year-old’s Olive Garden birthday party.  Unfortunately, he probably got foodborne illness from undercooked meatballs.  And his mother says he can cook.

I just finished cleaning the mess, and I’m fed up with him

“Aaron”

Starting Sunday, I have to start babysitting my neighbor’s kid “Aaron” (I do not think I should use his actual name).  Aaron’s mother is going on a sort of vacation/retreat with a church group.  Thus, her son will stay home and I’ll keep an eye on him for the week.  I have a few duties as his babysitter:

• Drop him off to day camp on my way to work
• Pick him up after work
• No TV (his mother is a very strict parent)
• 9:00 is bedtime

He’s only eleven years old, and he knows how to cook his own dinner.  I’m quite impressed with him; he seems like a smart and, more importantly, a calm kid.