Friday Poundings: Being unsupervised in someone else's house

I recently had occasion to look after my 7-month-old niece for several hours. She was my "practice baby" and we had a lovely time together, except that she squirms and rolls like a motherf**ker during diaper changes and good lord, if you have never changed a diaper before, that is NOT the way to be introduced to it. (I thank the good lord that she didn't have a big ol' poop while I was watching her, because that probably would have ended with us both naked and crying in the backyard while I sprayed the baby with a hose)

I went over to my sister's house to watch her, and stayed until my sister got home, and so the whole thing ended up being eerily reminiscent of all the babysitting I did when I was a teenager. And while there are a lot of things about babysitting that suck (like, for example, you have to take care of someone else's kid without maiming/killing that kid or spraying poop off them with a hose), there are also some things that are pretty awesome that I had forgotten about: mainly, that you get to be totally unsupervised in someone else's house.

First, there are the entertainment options. My sister and her husband have a whole movie collection and I hadn't seen a whole bunch of them. Of course, I didn't actually try to watch any of these movies, because I knew that working their DVD player with the universal remote was just going to be an exercise in frustration, but that's not the point. The point is, if I'd been willing/smart enough to figure it out, I could have watched all those movies. I used to trick the kids I was babysitting into watching all kinds of shit they didn't really want to watch just because I hadn't seen it before. Manipulating children is easy.

I think the best thing about it is that other people's houses have different snacks than your house, and since nobody is there to see you, you can totally eat whatever snacks you want. At one point during my baby-watching adventure, I got a little hungry so I went to the pantry and DUDE -- MY SISTER HAD FRUIT SNACKS IN THERE. Holy shit. I love fruit snacks. Why don't we have fruit snacks at home? This is madness. I am going to buy some next time we go to Costco. Those fruit snacks were so delicious I ended up shoving like half the bag's worth of gummies into my mouth at once. I could barely chew them. It was amazing.

She also had what looked like homemade blueberry muffins in the pantry. I wanted one. I wanted one bad. And even though she said "help yourself to anything," as she left, part of me felt like those homemade blueberry muffins were off limits. So I washed all the dirty dishes on the counter, hoping that with this act of altruism, I could assuage any guilt I would feel about eating one of the muffins. But then by the time I was hungry again, it was nearly time for her to get home, and I didn't want to get caught right in the act of jamming an entire muffin in my mouth. No amount of permission can absolve you of the guilt you'd feel if you got caught shoving something into your mouth and trying to swallow it whole before anyone saw you. Trust me -- I have done this before. Lots of times.

The point is, perusing other people's snack collections unsupervised is pretty much just the greatest.

I wonder what anyone would think if they tried to find a snack in OUR pantry ...

There is an ice cream cake in our freezer, though. It's been in there ever since I got a craving for ice cream cake when I was like 6 weeks pregnant. I'm now almost 22 weeks. I don't think anyone's going to eat the rest of that ice cream cake. Would you like to babysit for us?

"Help yourself to anything in the house."

Then again, ice cream cake seems like the kind of food you'd feel really awkward about eating at someone else's house. The kind of food you feel like the blanket permission to "help yourself" doesn't really apply to. You'd have to take it sliver by sliver, hoping to avoid making it look like you actually cut a whole piece. And you'd have to do it right by the open door of the freezer so that if you heard a key in the lock, you'd have time to shove the cake back into the box and the box back into the freezer.

I'd probably come home and find you like this:

You know I would. Because you're just as bad as me, and that's what I would do.

And this is why nobody invites us anywhere.

Also, I think my sister owes me a blueberry muffin now.

In fact, I'm pretty sure of it.

I mean, look at what kind of crap I had to put up with? An adorable baby sleeping on my lap for hours with her arm over her head? Ugh, where's my muffin?!?! You can tell how annoyed I was because I took this picture (and a bunch of others) and sent them to like everyone I know.