My Little Assistant

My Little Assistant
I’m a Realtor. A pretty good one if I do say so myself. I’m a better negotiator than William Shatner is in all of those Priceline commercials. One of the reasons I decided to become a Realtor years ago was because I knew that one day I was going to be a Mommy and I wanted a job that had flexibility.
When I became pregnant, I had visions of my baby strapped securely in the Baby Bjorn going to scope out new houses on the market, taking customers out to see properties, sitting open houses with her on my lap… Of course, I had expected the perfect little baby girl but I got Hayden instead. The kid has quite a personality and all the power to her. She comes from an independent minded, aggressive, driven Mama. So who am I to judge her? I am starting to accept that this is just how she is.
At the beginning, it was easy to take her to showings. I would just hang the bucket car seat on my arm and off we went into the house. She would sit on the floor in the bucket seat and I would take my customers room by room. If she screamed, I would make a joke that “my assistant” didn’t like the layout, or that “my assistant” felt that the home was a bit over priced and needed a reduction. I’ve been fortunate that my clients find the whole thing rather hysterical. It became a running joke that “my assistant” would call them to schedule our next outing. At my office, whenever I was late handing in paperwork (which is often) I would simply blame it on my lazy assistant.
Things were working out quite well even though I would get dirty looks at the office when she would throw a tantrum. There were many times I would run out the back door of my office at record speed with the Angry Little Diva holding on for dear life while she screamed.
It finally dawned on me that perhaps having a baby assistant wasn’t the best plan. One day we were at an inspection. Hayden was playing on the floor rather quietly and I was thanking God for her good behavior. All of a sudden I smelled something awful. As I was about to pick her up and sweep her out to the car for a diaper change I hear the inspector say to my client “That smell is horrible. It could be a lot of things. They could have dead rodents in the walls. It could be mold.” I was horrified. How was I going to interject that the stench that had caused all this worry was really coming from my six month old child? I was silent for a second and then heard my client say “Should we walk away from the deal?” and that’s when I jumped in. I explained that I thought that the offending smell was coming from Hayden and maybe while I went to change her they could just wait around to see if the smell went away. My face must have turned thirty seven shades of red. Meanwhile, Hayden just smiled and kept on babbling “DA DA DA DA DA DA”. She had no idea of how much her poop had almost cost Mommy and this poor couple.
Then there was the time that we were at a closing. My customers were buying an adorable little house and we were all excited that we had made it to the closing table quickly and without any problems. They actually requested that “my assistant” join us at the attorney’s office because they had grown to love her so much (she is such an actress for strangers). So, happily (and warily) I obliged. We sat around the table and the attorney proceeded to go step by step through the paperwork. After about twenty minutes, Hayden started to become restless. I gave her one of her rice cookies to keep her quiet. She sat on my lap and chewed on it noisily. That bought me about another five minutes. Then she began to continually slap her hands on the table. The attorney (who I’ve worked with for many years and found the whole thing rather funny) just smiled and went about the closing as though there wasn’t a random kid pounding away on his expensive table. Then she wanted to climb on the table. Out came another rice cookie. This time she wasn’t falling for my trick. So I bounced her on my knee. She didn’t seem to be enjoying the bouncing as much as she usually does. Then it happened. She screeched and puked all over the attorney’s beautiful wood table. There was even a chunk on the closing papers. Globs of the white stuff. And it stunk. The attorney jumped up to go get some paper towels and I jumped up and debated whether I should run out of the room and cry. My clients laughed and thought “my assistant” was hysterical and said they thought it lightened the mood in the room. I disagreed.
So, I fired “my assistant”. She can go back to just being my angry little diva daughter. Now, my mother watches her much more often and I rarely take her out with clients. At the end of the day, she was a horrible negotiator and it took her forever to hand in paperwork.