The teen agers were eventually questioned by the police. One of them admitted he had stolen some money but two friends of him confirmed he had put the money back in place before leaving because they blamed him for this. We also found another piece of jewelry that was moved to some other odd place in the apartment. But the pearl necklace that was missing must still be some sort of trophy for one of the guys or girls.

Anyway, they all claimed that “it is the baby sitter’s fault” since she invited them in. The baby sitter started reimbursing us for this necklace and her parents and we are fine with this nice effort of repairing things. There was eventually no legal action against the teen agers given the fact that the only significant material loss for us is this missing necklace and none of the children were convinced of having robbed it.

We further learned from the little sister of the baby sitter that she was used to hosting her friends at home every saturday night when her parents were getting out… Her parents were badly surprised by all this event and they had some “explanation time” with her… Hopefully this will result in some positive change for their family. Given that the other teen-agers were “officially” questioned by the police, we hope that their parents also reacted to this story.

As a somewhat funny epilogue of this story, while doing some routine visit in our residence area, the police found a group of teen-agers wandering through the cellars of our buildings. The group fled but two of the teen-agers were caught by the police tham. One of them had some hashish on him. They were both held as prisoners at the police station for a couple of days. From the police point of view, it seems that it was the same group who visitted our home… except the baby-sitter who was forbidden by her parents to ever get back closer to her former friends and… who did not appreciate being designated by them as the main author of the party they had here…

good thing your babies are fine, and things are progressing positively… hope they are settled by now.

now i should further proceed with my work, else i could not answer your emails on recommender soon :)

It can be tough to find and keep trustworthy babysitters.

When our boys were but babies we had a teenage babysitter we liked quite a bit: very conservative and maternal it seemed. But later we found out she had a boyfriend. Who was part of a gang. Rough looking young lad, and a little scary acting. And, it turned out, sometimes the boyfriend came to our house when our babysitter was babysitting.

I dropped the babysitter off “home” one night after babysitting and found out that her new “home” was some seemingly communal gang apartment on the edge of a “turf” boundary with a rival gang.

“Drop me off on the street,” she advised, “as you shouldn’t pull in to the driveway or you will get into trouble with the gang.”

“But you have to drop me on on the OTHER side of the street, if you drop me off on this side, I’ll get shanked.”

All this in a small sleepy town where we felt comfortable leaving our front doors unlocked.

We decided we did not really need to go out anymore.

EP

Hopefully that girl learns a lot from it, preventing even more stupid mistakes in the future :-)