So I was relaxing at home last week, not being very productive – not unlike the week before – or this week for that matter – and I got an email from a pastor at my church. Apparently they didn’t have anyone signed up to take care of kids in the nursery during church on the upcoming Sunday, and they needed to find a few people. For some reason she had decided that college kids would be the best for the job. Contrary to what you’d expect, she does seem to know college students rather well, as she made sure to mention the possibility of financial compensation in the email.
I jumped at this opportunity for two reasons. First of all I need money. I haven’t started working yet, but I’ve been acting like I have a job for the last 3 months, in that I’ve been spending an insupportable amount of money on random unnecessary things. Like a boss. The second reason is that kids are fun to work with, and the other person asked to help in the nursery was a good friend of mine. So that’s technically three reasons. Oh well.
So I arrived at church that morning at about 7:45. This was incredibly difficult in itself, but I’ll go into that later/soon. The nursery needed to be manned (or womaned) for four hours from 8-12. The other helper Jessi and I decided to split the time. I would do the first hour and a half, she would do the second, and then we would both help during the last hour. At this point I wasn’t worried at all. Playing with kids for an hour and a half? I was born for this job. That might be a pun. Or a statement about my character and/or maturity level.
But then as I was about to head off to the nursery, Jessi asked me one solitary question, and it brought me screaming back to Earth in a tragic free-fall of emotion. “You know how to change diapers, right?” I suddenly realized that this job could end up being more than “trains, trucks, and dollies”. She gave me an admirably brief and thorough tutorial in diaper-changing, but I was too busy having horrifying visions of pushy, distressingly loud, soiled children, running around the nursery, creating a cloud of stink and describing their accidents in graphic detail. I figured I would have three options if a situation like that arose: 1) Ignore it. It didn’t happen. Act like the claims of soiled pants are all lies. Spray the child with febreze if the other kids start crying. 2) Try to potty-train them, that’s got to be easier than changing a diaper, right? 3) I guess I could attempt to change a diaper/demand Jessi leave the church service and come help me.
With my confidence shattered and my nerves feeling twisted, I smiled and said goodbye to Jessi, working my way to the nursery. At this point I should probably describe my condition. I had had only 4 or 5 hours of sleep, and I am not the kind of person who can survive on limited sleep. I had gotten up, gotten dressed, put in contacts, made coffee, and come straight to church, so I was appropriately disheveled. I was wearing gym shorts and a t-shirt, my hair was a little out of control, and I was gripping my coffee mug like I was stuck on a desolate planet full of vicious bear-like green aliens and the coffee was the precious space-ship fuel that I was courageously carrying across the planet through terrible jungles and rushing red rivers, fighting to get back to my ship and escape the planet and the furious alligator-bear-rock-monster that was stalking-chasing-rolling after me.
So there I am, panicked, unwashed, and exhausted, sitting in a rocking-chair in the nursery, when the first family finally arrives. For a while I thought that I wouldn’t have any kids to take care of during that service, but I’d decided to wait for a while just in case.
—Now to protect these kids’ identities, I’m not going to use their real names. Every child who appears in this post will be given a cool Scandinavian name to replace his or her own.—
The first child was Ulrik, a blonde, smart, car-loving kid of about….4? I’m really bad at children’s ages. He could talk plenty? I’m sure I seemed a little sketchy and unfamiliar to the parents when they were dropping him off, so I felt it was my duty to make them feel comfortable with leaving their son under my control. It didn’t help that there was no sign-up sheet for them to fill out as they dropped him off, although there usually is apparently. Despite this sketchiness, the parents decided to trust me, and thus Ulrik was left to hang out with me. This may’ve been because it’s extremely awkward to try to drop your child off and then back out of it, so they based their choice on Ulrik’s willingness to play with me.
For the next hour or so we embarked on a voyage of awesomeness through the nursery room, finding everything fun, playing with it for a moment, and then leaving it on the floor. We pieced together an alphabet Winnie the Pooh puzzle, but we just built a long line across the room with it and didn’t actually fill it in with the letters. We filled a barn playset with a huge variety of plastic foods, and we drove trucks and cars over every inch of the floor. We also moved a large bookstand away from the window so that we could watch and listen to cars pass by. Ulrik was one of those kids who doesn’t *finish* playing with anything. He’d do half a puzzle with me, go push a car halfway around a track, and then listen to me read half a story before he moved on to something else. Cleaning up was something we did not do.
So for that first hour, the nursery was a paradise of childish fun. All things must come to an end, however, and this one came sliding to a frustratingly selfish end once the second child of the morning arrived. This was Torvald, who was an innocent, brown-haired child of 2 or so? Maybe? He could walk and everything plenty but he was not as much of a big boy as Ulrik, and he may’ve been able to talk a little, but he didn’t really. Torvald was not the problem though. He was the opposite of demanding actually; Torvald just wanted something to play with. Anything. He didn’t seem to have a favorite toy, he just wanted something. Sadly, Ulrik was not okay with this. He wanted everything, which meant nothing for Torvald. Ulrik had already established a playtime dynamic that he was not willing to adjust, not even a bit, for Torvald. Torvald tried out a random ‘Q’ in a ‘T’ spot in the Winnie the Pooh puzzle, and Ulrik freaked out. Torvald took a random strawberry out of the plastic barn, and Ulrik freaked out. Torvald pressed the ‘light up and make noise’ button on the fire truck, and Ulrik FREAKED OUT. I think I was doing an admirable job of containing Ulrik’s freak-outs and talking him down from the ledge, (disclaimer: ledge=figurative) but he was *not okay* with his fire truck being pushed by another kid. He ended up taking the truck apart, and then stuffing every part of it into the play-oven where presumably Torvald would not find it because he hadn’t developed the idea of object permanence yet. Which is silly because I’m fairly sure that Torvald was more than a year-old – Ulrik’s knowledge of basic theories in Developmental Psychology was surprisingly lacking. I know it’s bad to start sentences with prepositions like that but I don’t care.
It seemed like a constant struggle to let Torvald have fun. I felt like he was a sim that had very few opportuntities to fill up his fun bar, so he could only sporadically watch TV or play chess for a few minutes at a time (remember minutes=seconds in sim world). I was desperately trying to fill up his fun bar, giving him a few sim-minutes with each toy while I held off Ulrik for a bit. Fortunately the rest of Torvald’s satisfaction bars must’ve been filled up rather well, because remarkably he did not seem overly upset by Ulrik’s continuous attempts to take toys from him. Torvald must have brothers. Ulrik clearly did not.
Luckily, Ulrik’s parents were only there for the first service, while Torvald’s were there for Sunday school, which means that their time-slots only overlapped by about 20 minutes. When Ulrik’s parents arrived, we were playing with a big slide structure thing, about 1.5 feet tall. There was a spot on top to drop a ball in, and then it went around a long slide until it came out one of four random exits at the bottom. There were four balls, and Ulrik wanted them all, but just for holding. Ulrik would block the ball entrance on top with one of his, and I’d push his in, and quickly tell Torvald to drop his in. Then Ulrik would try his hardest to grab both of the balls as they came out of one of four exits at the bottom. I would race to get one of those back to Torvald, and then the process would repeat.
Then Ulrik’s parents tried to teach him a lesson about sharing and cleaning up after oneself – I tried to explain that the failure to clean up was probably mostly my fault. Jessi also arrived at this point, and it made me feel good to see that Torvald was going to get a quality playtime experience after all. Seeing that everything was under control, I left to go to Golden Corral for a nice brunch with friends.
Golden Corral was not very exciting though, and it is not the point of this story. Although they did have a chocolate fountain (FOR BRUNCH??) which blew my mind. I dipped every single piece of pineapple they had into it, and then I ate it. (The pineapple, not the chocolate fountain itself).
I arrived back at about 11:10, and I came in to join Jessi in the nursery. At this point there were three new kids there, all there for the duration of the third service. Jessi quickly gave me the lowdown on their names and archetypes. First of all there was Astrid, “the talkative one”. Then there was Ivar, “the quiet one”, and finally there was Bjorn, “the crazy one”. The way she said it however, was not like “Ohhhh there’s Bjorn, he’s so wacky.” It came off more like “That one is Bjorn. I am scared of him.”
When I first came in, both Astrid and Ivar were playing with the infamous Winnie the Pooh alphabet puzzle, although they appeared to be much better at it than Torvald and much more focused on it than Ulrik. Bjorn was pushing a big toy truck full of plastic blocks around, and dumping it on the floor. Then he would giggle, pile it back in the truck, and look for a new place to dump. This was a little eerie but basically harmless, except that I had to steer him away from dumping the blocks all over the puzzle in front of Astrid. More importantly, however, I constantly had to steer him away from just dumping the blocks all over Astrid.
Eventually Bjorn abandoned the truck for a bit and began to run around the room squealing maniacally. He would just run until he found a wall or other large obstacle. His wacky and chaotic curly blonde hair added to the effect. I don’t think the obstacles pleased him though, because he found that he had to slow down or he would hurt himself. This led to him returning to the truck unfortunately. He began to push it wildly all over the room, yelling and plowing into things at top speed. I don’t think he broke anything in the room, but not for lack of trying. He mercilessly smashed into cabinets and walls repeatedly. What I was more worried about, however, was that Astrid or Ivar would accidentally step into Bjorn’s path. Or more realistically, Bjorn’s path would happen to be straight through where Astrid or Ivar already were.
In the course of that hour, all three of the kids took turns on a big toy vacuum, which gave me a fascinating glimpse into their character, and possibly their parent’s housecleaning habits. Ivar did not seem interested at all in “tidying up” and so only spent a short time on the vacuum. Bjorn spent a little longer with it, but eventually he decided that the truck was marginally more satisfying to smash into things. Astrid spent the most time with the vacuum, and her parents had obviously made neatness very important in her household. She seemed perfectly satisfied to vacuum idly around the room, but I wanted to make it a little more fun, so I retrieved what was essentially a vacuum, except that instead of having a vacuum at the bottom, it had a duck with moving legs. So not like a vacuum at all. I rolled the duck around the room, but inevitably he would run into the fake suction of the fake vacuum, causing him to jump around and quack wildly. She thought this was hilarious, but unfortunately so did Bjorn. He began to target the duck with his rampaging truck of chaos, which meant that the vacuum was also in his path. I had to work incredibly hard to keep him from running over all four of us.
It was also during this long period of smashing the truck into walls that I got to know Ivar a little better. He eventually began to come out of his shell and talk a little bit more, probably after he realized he was not in immediate danger from Bjorn. At one point a big sports car was driving by outside, and we all heard it because Ulrik had left the window open earlier. Without a moment’s hesitation, Ivar jumped to his feet and rushed to the window, repeatedly shouting “WHAT THE HECK!” He was obviously very excited about this happening. Bjorn also ran to the window, but for some reason he was more interested in closing the window to the car noises outside. Surprisingly out of character for Bjorn.
Another unexpectedly interesting event was when Jessi took a huge “Richard Scarry’s Rainy Day Book” out of the corner. At least that’s what I think it was. Upon opening it, Ivar shrieked with glee, pleasantly shocked that Richard Scarry had thought to include trains in his book. This shrieking and unceasing gushing about trains went on for a while. When he was distracted we managed to turn the page, which is where we saw a picture of a small pond. Astrid did not seem especially enthusiastic about the pond, but that didn’t stop her from laying down, using the entire book like a bed, and slurping from the small drawing of a pond. She seemed relaxed and calm, almost disinterested, but she continued to lick this illustration, sprawled as she was across Richard Scarry’s masterpiece. This only became a problem when Ivar remembered the book and realized that nothing made him happier than pointing at a picture of a fox in a train and asking me deep questions about the fox and the caboose. If there was a dramatic climax to our time in the nursery, this was it. Bjorn was squealing and running and crashing into various objects around the room, Astrid was stretched across the book and eating the pond, and Ivar was yelling about trains and desperately trying to lift the page directly under Astrid.
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| This might've been it. |
Luckily their parents arrived soon after this, and all the kids were satisfied and happy with their time in the nursery. There were no injuries, little to no visible damage to toys or cabinets, and my heart grew three sizes. I learned a little bit about myself, and even more about the nature of reality and youth. The kids taught me not to shy away from the tough questions, like “Why is there a fox in the train? Is he the engineer? Why does he have a hat?”
Sorry this thing is so long. If it makes you feel any better I can still split it in half.
Disclaimer: The kids were never in any danger of anything, including stagnation in horrible dirty diaperness or death by truck. If it sounds like they were, I was exaggerating. I promise.
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