Babysitting.

One of the things you notice about getting older is that you stop caring that your Friday night consists of The Office reruns and takeout. It's not just that the party's over, it's that you don't even notice it's over. I spent about three years transitioning from the action-packed weekend to one where a night out at the movies is, like, really exciting. First it's going out Friday and staying in Saturday. Then it's laughing about the fact that you're gonna stay in both nights, calling yourself an "old-fart" to friends who ask what your plans are. And then, suddenly, you're no longer qualifying how boring your weekend is. That's just what it is, and it's normalcy is so ingrained it takes an actual night out to notice.

So I didn't exactly have any grandiose plans in place this Friday when Jason called me on his way home from work. A screening of Bruno was on the agenda, and maybe some frozen lasagna. But Jason had other ideas.

"Guess what we're doing tonight?" he asked.

"Being old farts?"

"Yes. And babysitting."

So he tells me that at the last minute he agreed we would watch his former cousin's four-week old baby (it's his first cousin's ex-husband's child with his new wife, to be exact).

About an hour later, there was a baby sitting in my living room.

Until a month ago, I had never even seen a baby. Never held one, never smelled one, never touched one. And then my friend Morgan's sister took my baby-holding virginity and let me hold her adorable three-week old daughter. And last week I met my friend Jaclyn's oh-so perfect two-week old. And now, here I was, actually responsible for one for a whole three hours.

We spent the first ten minutes oooh-ing and ahhh-ing over the little guy (who had the most impossibly full head of black hair and chubby cheeks that would put my Prednisone days to shame). He was quiet, and smiley, and Louie was terrified and sat watching his future. I watched Jason hold him and rock him and sat watching my future.

And then the pretty little moment was over and the crying began.

For the next three hours, we tried every possible thing we could think of to make the formerly adorable baby be quiet. We fed him, we burped him, we rocked him, we sang to him, Jason played guitar for him, we bounced him, we held him, we laid him down, we changed him, we pleaded with him. Nothing worked.

Minutes before his parents came to pick him up, he miraculously fell asleep. And they walked into what looked like an idyllic picture, their son asleep with his pacifier in his carseat, the babysitters looking happy and relieved. And I spent the rest of my night trying to convince myself that it will just be different when it's my child. I'll be able to make her stop crying. I'll be able to tolerate her noise. I'll be able to retain a semblance of my sanity.