Creepy Uncle Max (and Other Babysitting Adventures)

One of our vocabulary words today was "vilify."  It means to speak ill of someone, essentially making them out to be a villain (whether or not they deserve it).  One of my girls raised her hand eagerly. "I know a good example sentence for that word!" she said. "All of the babysitters have vilified Creepy Uncle Max!"

"YES!" I replied, matching her enthusiasm.  "That is a perfect use of the word vilify!"  Then I decided that this should probably be a blog post.

My junior high girls have been volunteering to babysit for my cousin Danielle (remember her?  She's the one with five kids and the deployed husband - aka "superhero mom").  I know my girls have felt proud to be "doing their part" to help a military family, and I think it's helped Danielle out to have a few extra hours a week.  Win/win.  Anyway, the girls have been doing this volunteer babysitting since the beginning of January.  Toward the end of January, Danielle's brother Max moved in with Danielle and the kids.  He's "Uncle Max" to his nieces who attend my school.  Apparently Danielle, her girls, and I all forgot to mention that Uncle Max had moved home.  Just this past week, he moved back to Russia.

One day after school last week, Lorelei (Danielle's daughter) was hanging out in my room.  A bunch of junior high girls were there as well (because what better things do junior high girls have to do after school than hang out with a teacher?  APPARENTLY NOTHING).  Speaking to Lorelei, I said, "Did you say goodbye to Uncle Max last night?  He left for Russia today, didn't he?"  She said, "Yep!  I hung on his leg ALL NIGHT and wouldn't let go even when he said let go!"  Perfect.  I bet Max didn't cry about getting on that plane.

"Wait!" One of my girls had overheard my conversation.  "That creepy guy is Lorelei's uncle?!"

"What creepy guy?"  I asked.

"We were babysitting," the girl started, "when suddenly this random GUY just walked in the house.  He didn't even knock!  Just WALKED IN!  He looked at us and said, 'Hey, I'm going to go take a shower,' and then he WALKED RIGHT BY US!"

(Side note - sorry for the excessive capital letters, but junior high girls absolutely speak in excessive capital letters.  It's true.  Trust me.)

"So THEN," she continued, "I was obviously, like, SUPER FREAKED OUT, because who is this random MAN walking in off the street when we're babysitting!?  So I got the phone and was going to call the police, but HANNAH said that we should first check if the kids know him.  So I said okay, and when we asked the kids they said yes, they knew him.  But I never knew he was their UNCLE!"

Personally, if I may interject again, I sort of wished they would have called the police.  Because how hilarious would that have been?!  But I digress.  Back to my story.

One of the other girls in my classroom chimed in with, "No WAY!  That must be the SAME GUY that we saw!  We were playing in the basement with the kids when I heard something going on upstairs.  I thought Mrs. Gibson had come home, so I went to check.  When I got to the top of the stairs, there was this completely RANDOM dude in the kitchen just DOING THE DISHES!  So I obviously freaked out and ran back downstairs to get Terri, who was babysitting with me.  She came upstairs too to see who the random guy was.  But except then he SAW US, which was totally scary, and he said, 'Oh hey, don't mind me.  My dad will be here any minute.'  Which, we were like, WHO IS THIS GUY AND WHY IS HIS DAD COMING OVER?!"  (Max's dad was picking him up for work, I assume, but these girls obviously didn't know that.)  "Anyway, it was SUPER creepy," they concluded.

"Hey!" Lorelei piped up.  "Uncle Max isn't creepy!"  Oops.  I'd been laughing too hard to properly defend Uncle Max.

"Lorelei," I said.  "I know.  But why didn't you tell anyone that he was your Uncle Max?"  She looked pensive for a moment and then said, "Huh.  I never thought of that."

She never thought of that, ladies and gentlemen.

Danielle came to pick up Lorelei, but my girls didn't stop talking once she left.  They were on a roll now.  Apparently all of them had had some sort of run-in with "that creepy guy," but no one had talked about it with each other until this moment.

"...and this ONE time," another girl said, "we suddenly heard toilets flushing and all these noises going on in the house, but no one was supposed to be home!  We were SOOOO freaked out!  Then that guy walked out and said, 'I'm going to go ride my bike,' so I thought, 'Pretty harmless...he's going to go ride a bike,' but then he went outside and GOT ON A MOTORCYCLE!!!"  She said with the same amount of shock and horror that someone would use to say, "AND THEN HE STARTED PUNCHING KITTENS."

"One time when WE were babysitting," chimed in another girl, "We were playing in the basement. One of the kids wasn't doing what we said, and this CREEPY MAN VOICE from upstairs said, 'KIDS!  YOU HAVE TO DO WHAT THE SITTERS SAY!'  and we looked at each other like, 'What on earth just happened?!  WHO IS TALKING?!'  And it was totally that same creepy guy!"

Another girl spoke up, finally getting the attention off Max for a quick minute.  "And then there was this OTHER GUY," she said, "who walked in totally without knocking and said, 'Hey Lorelei, where's the Tylenol?' so Lorelei went and got him some.  Then he said, 'thanks' and TOTALLY JUST LEFT!  AND WE HAD NO IDEA WHO HE WAS!"  Apparently that time the Gibson kids decided to step up and explain that that guy was their grandpa.  Uncle Max was never afforded the same luxury.

"...and the thing about Uncle Max," said one of the girls from before, "is that he wouldn't be so creepy if he didn't wear that gangster hat."

I laughed so loud when she said that.  Obnoxiously loud.  "Gangster hat?" I clarified.  "You have got to be kidding."

"Yes!" all of the girls backed up the first one on the fact that Uncle Max most decidedly does wear a *ahem* "gangster hat."  They tried to describe it to me, but I wasn't getting it.  Finally one of them drew it on the board:

It is notable that she also drew this man smoking a cigarette, and I said, "Erase that.  Don't draw cigarettes on my board.  Why does he have to have a cigarette?"  Her response was, "Because creepy people always smoke, so he probably smokes.  And it makes him look more creepy in my picture."

This was funny because...well...because it was.  Anyway, I've known Max for quite a while (read: ten years) and I have never in my life seen him wear this type of hat.  Either there's another legitimately creepy guy hanging around the Gibson house, or my girls are making up the hat thing.  (Max, if you read this - what's up with the gangster hat?!  Any idea what they're talking about?)  Finally I got the artist girl to admit, "Okay, it doesn't look exactly like that hat, but he totally does have a weird hat!"

After our discussion on Uncle Max, the girls turned to telling me about their other babysitting adventures (Berlynn prayed that God would turn Tucker into a statue...their dog Jasmine makes a break for freedom any time the door is open...the girls like to roll around in the mud, but the boys only like to play with soap... I have tons of these stories.)

I had largely forgotten about our discussion until this morning during our vocabulary lesson.  Kudos to my girls for realizing they had vilified Uncle Max.  After the example sentence, one of the girls piped up and said, "I babysat this weekend, and Lorelei said, 'Uncle Max is gone now, so you don't have to worry about him popping in and freaking you out anymore.'"

Phew.  The Gibson house is safe once again, and my students learned a new vocabulary word.  I can sleep well tonight.