Ms. Monica

                Babysitters are a necessary part of life. What happens to children when their parents have to work late, or when they want to go out late at night for an special occasion? The children  are sent to babysitters. Babysitters are supposedly kind people that watch young kids, which in my experience is true. I had sitters since I was young, but I barely remember most of them. But there is one that will never forget. She was a big part of my childhood, and I still remember to this day, Ms. Monica.

                Ms. Monica was an elderly lady in her 60’s, but she was full of energy. I first met her, because she lived in my neighborhood and every Tuesday I would go to her house and practicing playing the piano. It was then that she informed my mom that she also ran a daycare service at her house for a wide range of hours. I remember during the summer I would be there from 7:00am to 7:00pm, and I loved every minute of it. In the morning she would feed me breakfast which was usually a toasted bagel with strawberry jam. And then we would do whatever activities she wanted to do that day. Generally I helped her outside with her garden, by digging holes to plant flowers, and weeding it, and other times I would play with other kids she also watched. Her house was by these woods that we would explore, and we once found a tree that fell down, but was caught by another tree, so basically it was at a diagonal. We would climb this tree all the time, for some reason it never get old or even found it dangerous.  We would also have and “adventure” by wondering deep into the woods past the thorny vines to find this one creepy house that we would pretend was haunted. All this was just a regular day.

                One major thing that Ms. Monica did for me was that she taught me how to play chess. She would have chess tournaments at her house that I would occasionally win. I still like playing chess till this day, and I’m grateful that she took the time to teach me. She would always do kind things for me, actually one year for my birthday she made me a pound cake with strawberries and a whipped cream frosting, and it made me so happy that still clearly recall it.

Now as I type about this I realized she did more for me than I thought.  She was probably the biggest reason I had such a happy childhood.