Bad Jobs: Babysitting: Birthday Party

I HAD A FEELING CHILD ONE AND CHILD TWO WERE not officially invited to that neighborhood boy's birthday party. There was no invitation to be found, first of all, and the first time they even heard about the birthday was 15 minutes before the party was leaving for Chuck E. Cheeses. I asked to see an invitation, I called the kids' parents to find out if indeed they were invited to a birthday party, but they didn't answer their phones.

I knew it was rude to saddle some kids' mom with two more kids -- especially these two in particular -- at the last minute. But the visions I had of them being out of the house were too strong for me to come to any other decision.

"If you wash up and put on some clean clothes, you can go," I said. I made the barely literate boys make a birthday card from the only paper in the house I could find -- a page on the fridge that one of the girls had scribbled on with crayon. Like when a tattoo artist is asked to disguise a man's name with flowers on a scorned woman's arm, I told the boys to turn their sister's drawing into a birthday card. I made them scrounge up any money they had, which came to 7 dirty, wrinkled dollars, to stuff into the homemade card.

I wasn't about to have those kids show up empty handed to a party they weren't invited to.