Myles's Black Eye

I am here at Megan's house (my oldest sibling for those who can't keep us straight, so . . . everyone) babysitting her five children. With my three children that makes a grand total of 8 children aged 9 and under. No worries--this is a normal occurrence. I can totally handle it.

However, I am not sure if Myles can handle it. Myles is Megan's oldest boy. He's 8. Of Megan's five children only two are male. Anders is only 2 so Myles is still very much in the "play soft with the baby" mode with him. (Quick sidenote--Anders is a family name from our Danish side and if you will all remember Rasmussen is my maiden name, and guess who the Prime Minister of Denmark is--Anders Rasmussen. Pretty cool.)

Back to the point of the story. Myles is tremendously great with little kids. He has spent most of his life playing with girls so he knows how to be gentle and play nice, most of the time. And the boy loves little kids and is one of the best cousins for playing with the littler cousins and keeping everyone entertained. Unfortunately for Myles, he made the colossol mistake of thinking that my three year old BOY would be approximately as vicious and strong as his three year old SISTER.

Then he handed my son a sword, held up a pillow for protection, and encouraged Cowen to whack him. Repeatedly. Theoretically I am here to prevent these sort of potential disasters from turning into authentic disasters, but the boys were having fun and Myles was pretty adept at protecting himself. But . . . as we all knew would happen, eventually Cowen got lucky and MAN did he whack the tar out of Myles. Myles has a lovely bruise under his eye to show for it. Cowen is considerably more vicious and strong than Kiersten (age 3) who hid and whimpered pretty much through the entire pillow fight.

I can't blame Myles for his unkind intentions to beat Cowen down once he stopped rolling around on the floor crying and holding his eye, but I did draw the line at that. Maybe I'm a bad babysitter but while I am okay with an 8 year old arming a 3 year old and instigating a rip-roaring pillow fight. I am definitely not okay with said 8 year old beating the tar out of the 3 year old for getting in a solid swing. Of course, once the pain eased Myles came to his senses and stopped trying to get even, and as I confiscated the sword at that point, the pillow fight resumed in a much less dangerous manner.

And as you probably all could guess, since the danger was decreased so was the interest in the pillow fighting and shortly thereafter it fizzled and died. At which point dinner was delivered (Megs is in a dinner group) and the children could focus their energies on more productive pursuits, like figuring out how much milk and food they could spill on the floor.