Child Proof : Baby-Sitting Class Gives Kids Confidence to Handle the Job

You have to be 11 to attend baby-sitting class. You have to be 11 and you have to promise not to heckle the other students or call them dumb when they don’t know the answer to a question.

Also, it helps not to giggle when the teacher talks about the baby puking and stuff like that.

These are the things you have to learn first off. You don’t have to learn how to get a toddler’s yellow tank top out of a tree, which is what I had to do when I got home from the Community Medical Group’s baby-sitting class in West Hills on Wednesday.

“Where is your new yellow shirt, Sammy?” I asked my 3-year-old, puzzled that the brightly colored top had made it from the Target bag to oblivion in less than three minutes.

His answer was matter-of-fact.

“In a tree,” he said.

And so it was. I got a long pole, and exercising a skill that was not, as it turns out, covered in baby-sitting class, fished the shirt out of the bottlebrush tree.

There were 30 of us in baby-sitting class--25 girls, two boys, a Dad, another Mom and me. It was held in the conference room of the Community Medical Group’s office on Woodlake Avenue.

We learned some very important things.

It’s really OK to telephone the parents if the baby gets hurt, even if it interrupts them at a party.

“If the child falls down or the child eats Advil, don’t be afraid to call the parents,” said Nora Hayes, the CPR specialist who taught the class. “Don’t think you can do it yourself.”

This is very true. One time, when I was little, my friend Larry Forman and I decided to eat what we thought was rock candy. It didn’t taste very good, which is because it was really crystallized laundry detergent.

Hayes, who is really very good at teaching baby-sitting, asked the class a question.

“What if,” she said, “you are pushing the child in the swing and you push too hard and the child falls out of the swing?”

Abe Horowitz, who is 11, thrust up his hand.

“You should look through the child’s hair for a cut,” he said.

Everybody nodded.

Abe was attending the class with his dad, Ben, and baby sister, Amanda, who is just 2 1/2 months old and the potential baby-sittee.

You shouldn’t move the child if he is injured, Abe said, unless he is out in the middle of the street or something.

“ ‘Cuz then they’d get really injured,” Abe said. “They’d be flat.”

Another thing we learned how to do in baby-sitting class is how to perform the Heimlich maneuver on yourself. We learned that after we learned how to do it on kids and babies.

For babies, you just turn them upside down and whack them between the shoulder blades. But you do it only if they’re really, really choking and they can’t breathe and also you have to do it while you’re on the way to the phone to call 911.

Sapphire Rodriguez, who is 16, came to the class with her cousin Chyna Barber, and their friend Tiffany Mester.

Chyna’s mom, Diana Barber, brought the girls because she thought they could start a baby-sitting co-op in their Van Nuys neighborhood.

Tiffany, who was wearing a man’s work shirt that said “Geronimo” on it, watched Chyna practice baby Heimlich on a doll.

“You’re turning it too far upside-down,” she said. “It’s going to puke on your shoes.”

Which is another thing they don’t teach you in baby-sitting class: If the baby only throws up on your shoes, consider yourself lucky.

We didn’t even get into the whole poop thing, except that Abe suggested being careful that the baby is stabilized on the toilet so it doesn’t fall in.

My favorite story along those lines comes from my friend Louise, whose baby let go all over her, himself and the floor at Williams-Sonoma in the Glendale Galleria.

“Excuse me, but my son just pooped all over your floor,” she said to the clerk, and left the store.

This is not necessarily a good reason to call the parents if you are baby-sitting, unless you can’t figure out how to get a new diaper on. Which also happened to some people I know.

While baby-sitting an infant, they fastened the diaper with packing tape.

This would never happen to Wendy Blanton, who is almost 11 and attended the class with her sister, Julia.

They are both very serious about baby-sitting. Wendy even named the doll on which she practiced the Heimlich maneuver.

“Bye, Tommy,” she told the doll at the end of the class.

“Two of my neighbors have toddlers, 2 and 3,” she explained. “I would like to baby-sit for their children. And I thought it would make them more comfortable if I took the class.”

At the end of class, Hayes asked everybody to think about what was the most important thing to give a baby.

“It’s showing that you care about them, so they’ll grow up to be a caring kind of person,” said Abe. “Instead of a mean kind of person.”

I wonder if he’s available this weekend.