For the most part, parents understand that they’re asking a huge favor when they get someone to babysit for them.
Considering that it’s normally a service people will pay for, the fact that a friend or family member is willing to do it for free should always be appreciated.
Still, some parents can nonetheless find themselves taking their support network for granted . After all, whether babysitting is a breeze or a huge undertaking depends on how well-behaved the kid is and when you spend pretty much every day with a child, it’s easy to get used to their behavior.
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And it’s hard to imagine any other reason why one man wasn’t immediately mortified after his neighbor confronted him about what his child did while she was watching her.
A lawyer in India recently agreed to watch her neighbors’ 11-year-old daughter while they went to receive their COVID-19 vaccines.
As she explained in a Reddit post , however, she told them from the very beginning that she had a virtual court appearance at 1:30 pm that she could not miss under any circumstances.
Although her neighbors promised they’d be back in time, this turned out not to be the case and the lawyer made the child a quick lunch and put on Netflix with the child mode enabled for her.
But while the lawyer was able to make her court appearance, she discovered the child had found another way to keep herself busy in the other room.
When she was able to check on the child at 3pm, she discovered that she had been trying on her heels, makeup, and work clothes. The results were a total mess.
In the woman’s words, “The lipsticks were broken, the white shirts were stained and the heels were scuffed. I do not know how that girl managed to cause so much damage in the first place.”
So naturally, she took the girl’s father aside to tell him what happened when the couple arrived to pick her up.
And as she tells it, “I expected him to apologize. but instead, he blew up at me and accused me of leaving his young daughter alone and claimed that anything could have happened to her. He even threatened to file a case against me!”
Since this had only happened in the first place because the parents hadn’t arrived on time and since the child was still in the same home as her, the lawyer was taken aback.
She told him that she expected to be paid back for her damaged property and welcomed him to try his luck in court if he wanted, but that she was still sending him a bill.
Since their resident’s association was split when the father took the matter to them, the lawyer asked whether she had overreacted.
However, it turns out that she wouldn’t need Reddit’s opinion after all following a surprise visit from the child’s mother.
She apologized for both her daughter and her husband, who she said had made them late by not bothering to register for a vaccine appointment and thinking he could just show up as a walk-in.
She also brought over some delicious food for the lawyer and said she would try and convince her husband to pay because she was terrified of going to court.
This led the lawyer to just drop the matter entirely, but also to tell her that she wouldn’t be watching the child again, which the mother understood.
We see a lot of these dilemmas here but it’s not every day that they’re resolved so neatly like this!
h/t: Reddit | jointfamily