Birthday Extravaganza

I just started working for my friend, E, who created a company called SittersStudio- a babysitting company for families in NY which has expanded to include Chicago and will soon include San Francisco as well. I will repeat again, this is a babysitting company. Understood? Awesome.

So it wasn't out of the ordinary when E called me the other day and asked if I would be a sitter for a 10 yr. old girl's karaoke birthday party. She said I would be in charge of the karaoke machine and making sure the girls would be having a good time. There would be an arts and crafts section that another sitter would manage and there were only going to be 10 girls.

I walk up to this amazing apartment complex and say hello to the concierge who is going to be showing me around. Then the craziness begins. I find out that we might be kicked out of the party room, there will not be an arts and crafts section OR another sitter, they need me to help transport the balloons, there are going to be twice as many adults as kids at this party, I was going to have to harrass people to get them to dance and have fun, oh yeah, and the mom is a nutjob. Turns out, she wanted a DJ, not a babysitter, because I ended up messing with the machine all night, getting yelled at by her for not switching cables fast enough for her to sing "Hopelessly Devoted to You" (1 of probably 10 ballads she sang that night), and I had about 2 minutes with the kids when they asked me if they could sing Hannah Montana and she balked and said "No, I want my brother Steve to sing- they had their chance".... Really? REALLY???? Well, I guess they did sing Rihanna's "Please don't stop the music" with her I-Pod after the mom forced them to have a 10-yr old 'sexy dance competition' to the same song. Gross.

Let me give you the rundown on this 10 year old girl's birthday:

• 600 Pepto Pink Balloons (one to fill every square inch of the rented room)
• A 3-tiered pink birthday cake
• Full bar (for the 15-20 adults that I ended up babysitting)
• Strobe light and Disco ball (she wanted the room to look like a nightclub)
• A Photographer
• A Doorman
• Two Large Bags of Juicy Couture
• A Wii (that I ended up wrapping) + some games
• 1 Live Bunny
• A room overlooking the Statue of Liberty
• And yet, somehow, it was all about the parents........

At the end of the night, when they were getting kicked out of the room, the dad whipped out WADS of $100 bills. After the horror that I endured, did he tip me? I'll give you one guess....

This is normal in NYC???

~B