Instant Baby

About a year ago, when baby Erin was 6 or 7 months old, Deborah and I talked about when she would be able to leave her new baby overnight. Having experience with babies (I took care of my niece Sam from age 3 months to 2 years) I offered to be the first person to have Erin overnight. Deborah and Blayne always wanted to do something special for their 10th anniversary, so they took me up on the offer and we made plans to watch Erin for a few nights in August of the following year.
You guessed it, that's this weekend! I didn't think about school starting and having a new job in all this, but it's been great. We got Erin Thursday evening and had fun playing with her in the yard.




She had a lot of fun in the water and sitting in her chair with her own special place for goldfish and apple juice.
After getting soaked and filthy, we gave her a bath. We gave her an Oktoberfest mug to splash around with and she was content. After bath time and pajamas, she started saying, "night night" and rubbing her eyes. It was only 7:30 and Eric and I were in shock. We had heard all the stories of kids fighting bedtime. Not Erin! We put her down and that was it.

Friday Kathy watched Erin while Eric and I went to work.

Ok, don't go call social services on us! Erin LOVED putting herself in our dog kennels and when we asked her to come out she defiantly stated "no, in!" and would go in and out of each kennel. The dogs just sat and watched her with interest.

After another bath we decided to watch a little of her favorite DVD, "Wiggles." I was familiar with Raffi but not the Wiggles. Here is Eric watching the Wiggles sing and dance with Henry the Octopus...


Erin went to my staff party and I told everyone (so I thought) that we were just watching her for the weekend...so when someone asked me how old she was I said, "ah, I think 17 or 18 months, I'm not really sure." I got this look like, "wow, seriously you don't know how old your child is?" I realized this and explained the situation and we had a good laugh. Erin was cute as usual, impressing everyone with her large vocabulary. It started raining and she yelled "raining" and everyone was in disbelief. There were other kids her age there and none of them were naming everything they saw or pointing to name what people were doing. Oh no, they were running around playing! (for those of you who don't know Erin isn't too keen on walking yet).

She loves to be tickled and her laugh is the cutest thing ever.
She's a cutie and I think we are in love with her. I will be sad to give her back, but it will be nice to have a clean house and time to shower.