My sister's kids are a bad influence on my kids
By 9Honey | As told to Tanya Meyer|
I love my two nephews but they are hard work for my sister. Her twins, aged 12, can be absolute terrors. The biggest problem is when they come to my house and they lead my boys astray and, before you know it, something terrible has happened.
Recently my nephews thought it'd be "fun" to throw the cat in the swimming pool, then one of them got a packet of matches from the kitchen and set fire to a section of lawn out the back จC in the middle of fire season! Thankfully it was only tiny, but what if it had been worse?
What makes the situation tricky is my two boys, aged 8 and 10, hero worship their older cousins and think they are amazing. And they want to copy everything their cousins do, especially the naughty things!
I've lost count of the number of times I've had to put all four kids on "time out" กช and I refuse to babysit my nephews because I'm just too anxious to look after them by myself.
They come over to us at least twice a week and that's fine, if my sister is with them.
There was one time, about a year ago, that I agreed to have my nephews for a sleep over so my sister and her husband could go to a wedding in the Hunter Valley.
You know that saying, 'if kids are being quiet, you know they're up to no good'? Well I should have remembered that.
The boys were playing downstairs in a room that's devoted to toys and an X-box: it's a fantastic space for the kids and they are usually very well behaved in there because they're distracted by the video games.
But I had a gut feeling that something wasn't right when I walked past the room and the door was locked and I couldn't hear the video game.
I banged on the door and my nephew opened it and said he was sorry, he didn't realise the door was locked. Everything seemed to be fine.
My sister arrived not long after that, and they all left, quite happily. I was thinking, 'great, no dramas today!'
But then my 10 year old decided to come clean. He came over to me with a bottle of gin and told me his cousins had taken "daddy's drink" and had a few sips and then hidden it under a bean bag.
I was furious, especially when my 10-year-old admitted he had had "one little sip" but that he didn't like the "strong, gross taste." I phoned my sister right away and told her that her kids had gotten stuck into the alcohol!
She just laughed and said that explains why her boys had fallen asleep in the car! I'm not saying they got drunk, they probably just had a sip or two before realising it tasted bad. But that's just one small example of what I have to put up with when my nephews are over.
God knows what they're going to be like when they're teenagers. I'm just going to have to make sure that my boys are supervised when they're with their cousins, but I realise I won't be able to police this forever.
