Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Babysitting?

Why is it that I never get the time to spend with kids until I'm already "busy"?

Today at work someone had brought her two lively children into the library with her, and let them run loose while she worked. While I can see that it's probably very tough to handle two kids and work at the same time, and no professor is going to take "I couldn't find a babysitter" as an answer, I think that it would've been nice if she had at least kept the kids occupied with something other than a tricycle and a baby doll...

So here I come walking on my rounds in the mostly empty library, and I decided that to be nice to everyone involved I'd take the kids over to the little, badly-equipped "playroom" in the corner of the media center. No one was in there, at least, so I wasn't worried about keeping the kids quiet (they knew to be quiet but they're 4 and 5, so I doubt they had been properly drilled in self-control. Shrieks happen!). They tossed the puppets around, pulled a few books off the shelves and didn't bother me one bit. The puppets are entirely soft, so throwing them wasn't an issue. They finally settled on a game of "hit the monkey" with the blow-up monkey hanging from the ceiling and the puppets as balls. For little kids they had great aim!

I finally brought them back to mom after half an hour... she had said they were going to leave when I came up to her the first time, but she had apparently been thankful for the time without the little ones and had kept working. I didn't mind at all but I didn't want to keep the kids any longer without letting her know. I felt bad for them, though. It was obvious that they were bored and I didn't want to leave them unsupervised, but mom knows best... :/