Confessions of a 28 year old man.

So I was thinking, how I like to push peoples' buttons sometime. See how much it takes to get them going or whatever. I was thinking about this and thought of something from my childhood and this character trait has been in me for a long time.

When my youngest sister, Patty, was born, Mom had a troubled delivery so she was in hospital for quite sometime. Since dad was at work, and this was the summer, I was home from school. Joe and Jenny(my brother and sister for those that don't know) were too young for school. So we had to have a babysitter. I was seven at the time, Joe was three, Jenny two.

Her name was Mabel. 6000 pounds of pure terror. Now a days, she would of probably gotten in a lot of trouble for how she treated us. But remember this was 1985, and Mom and Dad really had no idea what to do babysitter-wise. Mom was a stay at home mom so they never really got us a babysitter. Things I remember her doing was dragging Jenny down the steps because she didn't want to come down, and throwing my meal away. She had no reason, except to be mean. She really liked my brother Joe, he never did wrong. So she made the meals and she said that mine was bad, but not Joe's. I suggested splitting Joe's and she said that wouldn't work.

So, another of her habits was in the afternoon she'd watch TV, and fall asleep. We never got to pick the program until at five o clock when Dad would come home, and she'd tell us that I had to tell Dad that I got to watch what I wanted all day. So, one day when she fell asleep, I rallied Joe and Jenny to help me with my project. My project? To take all the toys out of the toybox. Not just dump them out, mind you, but to spread them all out with landmine proximity. Each toy, each block, was about four inches from all the ones around it. I did this throughout the living room. When she woke up, she sees toys everywhere, but placed ever so carefully everywhere around the living room. She gets irrate. She starts yelling at us, why would Jenny and I do such a thing? I say that Joe helped, and she didn't believe that. She asks again why we did this. My response was "Maybe if you didn't fall asleep, we wouldn't of done something like this".

So, on one of her last days there, Dad came home from work early, to find her sleeping in the chair. He asks me if she does this all the time, and I said, yeah, she does. So he goes back outside and slams the door. Mabel immediatily wakes up and pretends that she'd been awake the whole time. Dad tells her that he caught her sleeping, and that I said she does it all the time. She said something about you can't believe kids, they like to make up stories.

The last few times she was suppose to babysit, she didn't show up. She sent her son one afternoon, his name was Joe(which explains the favourtism). The last few afternoons someone else took her place.

A month or so later she wanted to come see Patty. When she came to visit, Joe and Jenny went and hid upstairs. Mom said she didn't think it was as bad as all that, and didn't realize until they went upstairs to hide from her. I didn't hide, I stayed down there, I figured if I stood there, and didn't hide, that showed I wasn't scared of her.

So yeah, anyway. I've liked to be annoying since I was seven. Probably other stories going back earlier of my behaviour as such. But this is the one I remember.