In which I meet an awesome person

Some years ago, I was asked to watch three children for the night so that their parents could have a date night.

For the life of me, I can't remember their names, but there was a five year old boy, and one and a half year old twins.

These parents had one of the best ways of sneaking out without a fuss ever. They'd send the toddlers into the back yard and have them race each other three times. During the third circuit around the fenced in area, they'd creep back inside and out the door. The kids didn't even notice them leaving. 

I got my first taste of what the night was going to be like when the five year old looks up from his piece of pizza and says, "Can we watch Power Rangers while we eat?" Well, his parents hadn't said he couldn't, and I usually check such things, so I said "Sure! Why not!" The t.v. was already on, and it was (shudder) Power Rangers SPD (Space Police Department or something). 

So apparently, if you're a Power Ranger, you can be an alien that looks like a blue coyote who was kicked out of the Muppets, but once you morph, you look like a human ranger because they don't make dog-shaped helmets! (Is that racist of them? I think it might be, a little. Maybe it's species-ist.)

Anyway. We get through the whole episode with me wiping cheese and sauce off the twins' faces and cringing at the terrible special effects on the screen.

The show ends and we leave the t.v. on because none of us actually know how to turn it off. The five year old and I took the twins upstairs and played with blocks in their room for a while. Then the kid turns to me and asks if he can play alone in his room. "I got a lot of Transformers," he says, "And I don't want the babies to break them." 

Well, I didn't see anything wrong with that, since the room in question was right next door. He scrambles off to play with his action figures (which turned out to be three or four Star Wars Transformers crossover toys and a handful of characters from the 2007 Transformers movie). I, on the other hand, found a strange but effective way to keep the toddlers amused. The boy twin sat down at the bottom of the stairs and would not come back up. The girl twin sat at the top of the stairs and would not go down. So, I grabbed a bouncy ball and let gravity take it all the way to the little boy. 

They were delighted, which means that I had to repeat the motion some fifty gajillion times before they tired of it.

As the little girl was handing me all manner of things to toss down the stairs (most of them non-bouncing, like rubber ducks), we were all startled by a sudden commotion. See, up till this point, the older boy had been playing so quietly that all we could hear was a murmur. Now, though, the silence was broken by someone yelling, "MEGATROOON!" I jumped. 

Somehow or other, this five year old boy was doing a passable imitation of Peter Cullen and it was both hilarious and disturbing.

The following is what the twins and I overheard (As much as I can remember)

"Mwah ha ha ha ha! You'll never defeat me, Autobots!" (in a growly sort of voice)

"Not so fast, Megatron!" (The Optimus voice)

"Oh no! It's Optimus Prime!" (random Decepticon)

(various battle cries and explosions)

"You can't stop me, Optimus, because I have...THE DEATH STAR!" (I don't know where Megatron got a Death Star, but apparently he had one.)

"Look out, Luke!" (I think that was supposed to be Bumblebee)

"Aaaaah! It's Darth Vader!" (more explosions and a fair amount of screaming)

From the sounds of things, Darth Vader and Megatron teamed up against the Autobots and the Star Wars good guys. After that, it was mostly crashing noises and a whole lot of "AAAAHHHH!"

That kid was awesome.

When the parents came home that night, he ran up and declared that I had to come back because I knew the names of all four Ninja Turtles. Because that's a criteria for babysitting.