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I looked around the room. There were colored pencils and crayons scattered on the couch and two of the recliners. “What about art time?”
“I love coloring,” Micah said. “Dustin sucks at it.”
“Do not!” Dustin shot back.
I let the wordsucksslide. We could work on language later, after I had built a routine for them. Baby steps.
“We’ll do art at eleven,” I said, filling in the schedule. “And after that, lunch.”
The boys both thought this was agreeable.
I scheduled quiet reading time after that. I wasn’t sure the two of them could sit quietly for thirty minutes, but that was usually a good lead-in to nap time, which I put down next.
“Do you play outside at all?” I asked. I remembered seeing a little yard area downstairs, behind the offices.
“I play baseball,” Dustin said. “Micah playsbasketball.”
“I play both,” Micah argued.
“After the nap, we’ll have outdoor sports time,” I said, scribbling on the page. “Andthenwe’ll play games on your tablets.”
The boys were excited about their plan once it was done. They even insisted on trying to read it out loud. Dustin was a pretty good reader, and went down the list no problem. Micah was slower and had to sound out every letter before figuring the word out. Both were normal for their age.
I attached the schedule to the fridge with magnets. “I’m going to put the plan right here on the refrigerator.”
“No!” Dustin wailed. “Our dads will see it there! It’s supposed to be asecret.”
“Oh, right,” I said. Then I dramatically waved my hands over the paper. I flashed my fingers, then let my hands drift to my side. “Whew. It’s done.”
“What is?” Dustin asked.
“I cast a spell on the plan. Nobody can read it but us. And Cora.”
Micah gasped. “Just like Jim!”
“Just like Jim.”
Here’s a secret about nannying: it’s just acting. You’re acting like you’re interested ineverythingthe children do. When you need to, you act like their fun friend. And when they do something wrong, you act like the disciplinarian—even when the wrong thing they did wasreallyfunny.
As such, I fell into a groove with the boys as the day went on. They were calm during TV time, yet grew fidgety near the end. They wanted to do other things, so I kept reiterating that we had a plan.
“You can play with your colored pencils after TV time. We have to stick to the plan!”
I checked on Cora during a particularly exciting scene in Trollhunters. She was still sitting on the floor where I had seen her last, reading her book. Right now, I was exempting Cora from the schedule because it was easier to handle the two boys without introducing another distraction. If she was happy sitting in her room reading, then I was happy to let her.
“I really like your braids,” I said.
She calmly marked her place in the book before looking up. “Thank you very much. My daddy braided them.”
I pictured Asher, with his serious face and thick glasses, braiding this little girl’s hair. It made me smile.
“Did you need something from me?” Cora asked.
If a teenager had asked that, it might have been snarky. But coming from this adorable little girl, it came off as polite. “No, I was just checking on you.”
A shout from the other room disrupted the calm. I said goodbye and hurried out there to find Dustin on top of Micah, trying to shove crayons into his mouth.
I cursed—internally, not out loud—and rushed to stop them.
