If you think I'm uncoordinated now...

I was an avid babysitter as a teenager. I wanted to be a "baby doctor" from about age three until 17, so I needed some practice with kids. Once I posted an ad (a paper ad, drawn with markers on construction paper and taped strategically to our apartment mailbox cluster) and waited for my business to boom. I was 10, and the first call I got was from a mother who needed a babysitter for her 12-year-old boy. I took down my ad shortly afterward and decided to stick with babysitting my brother. By 13 I was babysitting for several families regularly. My friend Liz and I traded off jobs and referred each other to different families, kind of like they did in the Babysitters' Club books. It was rad. I got maybe $3.50-$4.00 an hour if the kids liked me.

I babysat regularly for seven year old Lauren and 4 year old Daniel Violi. The kids were great: energetic, polite, funny, and I think for a while they might have thought I was cool. Secretly I was not very cool, but I did try hard. Lauren loved to make up scenarios that I would then be obliged to act out. Often I played the role of a blind ballerina. Arms outstretched and with my glasses off to make it more realistic, I would stagger around doing pirouettes and tripping over dressers and toys and anything else in the way. Lauren LOVED this for some reason and she had a contagious laugh, so I ended up sacrificing my dignity almost every time I babysat.

Lauren was a gymnast, and apparently in her youthful innocence she thought my blind ballerina klutziness was all acting. One day she asked if I would do a cartwheel on her new and awesome balance beam thing. It was a giant foam bar you could walk along and only about 8 inches off the floor (thank God). People usually don't include 'graceful' in their descriptions of me. I'm not sure what exactly happened, but in slow motion it may have looked like me missing the balance beam completely and kicking an expensive and beautiful lamp off of a table. My lack of control over my limbs and eventually brain lasted for the rest of the evening. In the bathroom I reached (with an abnormally high elbow for some reason) back for some toilet paper and knocked over a costly ceramic tissue holder. It shattered. Excellent.

Later I left the oven on for four hours after we made pizza and I was not asked to babysit for them again.