93AA: a tale of battery-powered babysitting!

AA batteries! These two little letters spell out absolutely everything you need to survive a 93 minute power blackout. All while babysitting four rambunctious kids. The evening I now affectionately refer to as my ‘93AA’ tale tells you how.
Once upon a babysitting eve, four little Kirwans and myself were having dinner. Nine year old Michael Kirwan was making a persuasive argument for swapping broccoli for ice cream. Then the lights went out! Amidst the screams of delight, I reassured myself it was a temporary glitch. But darkness persisted.
A rapid search of the house yielded no candles and definitely no generator. Only a packet of AA batteries offered light at the end of the tunnel. Presently I got a txt from my mum saying the outage was expected to last over an hour. The devilish gleam in the Kirwan kids eyes (led by Michael!) told me anarchy was imminent. And so was their bedtime! So it was that I hit upon my 93AA strategy.
I didn’t know then that the power cut would last exactly 93 minutes. But I did know what my strategy was. Exhausting my four exhuberant babysitting charges using nothing but AA batteries . Here’s what my 93AA evening entailed:
• An outdoor game of spotlight
• Playing hide & seek with only a torch for light
• Making a ‘fort’ under the kitchen table & telling campfire tales by torchlight
• Running a ‘best of 3 games’ competition on Michael Kirwan’s PSP
• Creating ‘shadow’ animals on the wall using our hands
When the lights finally came on again, they shone upon four sleeping Kirwan kids. All huddled in the ‘fort’ with Michael Kirwan still holding his beloved PSP.
So what’s the babysitting moral of the story you ask? Simply this: engage a child’s imagination within any given situation and you’ve won! There’s a lot of press claiming today’s child is a couch potato interested only in electronic entertainment. But my 93AA evening proved to me that fertile imagination remains rich in children. All we need do is ignite and channel it! And as babysitters, we’re perfectly poised to do just that.

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