Dateline Boston — The kids I nanny for have a book that’s been around for five years. It’s a Halloween book, and it’s been looked at a lot in that time. It’s pretty simple. Each page has a different Halloween character with googly eyes. There’s a Jack-O-Lantern, a witch, a mummy, a robot, and at the end, a vampire. When you open the vampire page, a bat’s eyes light up, and the vampire laughs: “Ah ha ha ha haaaa…” Well, after turning to this page hundreds of times over the last few years, the vampire’s laugh stuttered a little, then finally stopped.
Nanny to the rescue! All we had to do was get new batteries for the book, and Vampire and his bat would be as frightful as ever. We needed special tools. Theo, who is 2½, has a passion for tools, so we had them at the ready. We needed two screwdrivers, a small Philips head, and a tiny flathead, the kind you use for eyeglasses. I removed the battery lid with the small screwdriver, and saw that there were three button batteries. I popped them out with the tiny screwdriver, put them in my pocket, and took the kids to the store to get replacements.
Have you ever had to buy a button battery? They are impossible to size. I squinted at the battery and wondered if I needed a higher magnification for my reading glasses. There was a number on the battery, and it sure didn’t coordinate with any of the numbers of the batteries at the store. Finally, I thought I saw something that matched. The 5-digit number on the battery might be translatable to the 3-digit number that was on all of the packages of the new batteries. I selected the battery I thought I needed; it was not cheap. $5.79. There were only two, and I needed three. I got the two and told the kids I’d go to another store the next day to get the other one.
Ooooh, Frankenstein!
I made good on my promise and got the third battery the next day. Now it was time to make Vampy come alive again! I felt like Dr. Frankenstein. I made a big deal about putting the batteries in. I took the lid off, opened all of the packages, and put the first battery in. It didn’t fit. It just sat on top, because it was too big. In my excitement, I had neglected to open just one battery to test it to see if it fit. Now I had three opened packages of unusable batteries—my mind conjured up an image of $17.37 being flushed down a toilet. I promised Theo that we would get different batteries.
The next day on the way to work, I stopped at a different store. This store had, if you can believe it, a battery sizer machine! You slid your battery in the slot, and it stopped at the size you needed. Perfect! It worked; I put the battery in, and it gave me a clear 3-digit number of the battery. They had three in stock. What joy! I happily paid my $17.37 and rushed to Theo’s house.
I was smart this time. Even though I knew these were the right size, I opened only one package and put the first battery in. It didn’t seem to fit. I pressed it down, and then it looked like it was okay. I told Theo, “Oh, you just need to jam it in, then it will work.” Using the word “jam” to put in a battery should have been a sign, but it wasn’t. I was so determined to make this book work that I jammed the other two in, with some difficulty, and got the lid. It rested atop the batteries like the bread on an overstuffed sandwich. I expressed my disappointment and whined about it not working. Theo said, “Let’s just pretend.” Leave it to a toddler to be more mature than the grownup when the going got rough. This time, my $17.37 flew out the window with tiny wings.
We opened the book again and I made a vampire laugh. But neither of us was really into it. We pretended to fix things that weren’t really broken for the rest of the day. I looked up the book on the internet, and found I could order it for one quarter of the price of all the batteries I bought. Happy Halloween kids, you’re getting a new vampire book. My lesson was scary, indeed.
Ms. Vaillancourt may be contacted at snobbyblog@gmail.com
