The first time Jim babysat it was a last minute thing. Toby's wife's mother was in the hospital in Miami and was insistent on seeing them both. Sasha was one and a half and couldn't sit still for a minute and in order to try to take a strain away from their all ready stretched relationship, Toby called Jim over at six for an overnight favour.
She had been smearing Spaghetti-Os when they were first introduced and threw a handful of sauce on Jim's new vintage tee shirt. Toby apologized as his wife kissed Sasha good-bye and they were gone, leaving an emergency contact sheet and a weary toddler.
She had eyed him for a good three minutes, another fistful of Spaghetti-Os ready to fire before crumpling into a sobbing mess of a baby.
It definitely wasn't Jim's idea of a good time but Mark was spending quality time with his new stewardess girlfriend and Toby had sounded so harried that he would have agreed to almost anything. He reasoned that a year and a half year old had to be more entertaining then Canary Yellow 52 Recycled Glossy Printing Paper.
Jim pulled a chair up and sat on it. He rested his chin on his hands and stared until Sasha ran out of tears and looked at him, more curious then afraid.
A giant glob of pasta fell from where she had smeared it in her hair onto her nose. She sneezed. Jim sneezed too. She giggled and Jim did too. Calculatingly, she reached across the space between the chairs and stuck the sauce she had been clenching up his nose. He reached into her bowl and drew war paint on her cheeks.
Toby and his wife would have no idea when they came home that their kitchen had become a no man zone during the Great Spaghetti-O War, or that Jim's mother was an expert as removing pasta stains from white carpets, nor did they realise that for the next month they would be pestered with random cries of "Gonna jet'cha!" and "Die! Die!"
The second time Jim and Sasha were alone together was when she was two and a bit and it was Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. Toby and Jim's desks were in the same cuticle and an overload of complains about Michael Scott by the Accountants due to a recent incident involving a rubber chicken and a condom had Toby too busy with interviews and paperwork to really keep an eye on her.
It had been a while but he agreed to look after her while Toby was busy. She spent fifteen minutes hiding under Toby's desk before Jim managed to lure her out with some chocolate and set to work teaching her how to loosen the chair's hinges. Every time Dwight stood up to go to the bathroom, Sasha darted under his chair across the office and worked furiously while Jim watched.
Every time Dwight sat back down she was safely colouring back at Toby's desk and both her and Jim were stifling laughter.
By the end of the day, Dwight's chair finally fell apart when he sat in it but when he tried to accuse Jim, Sasha had burst into tears and he had left a little bewildered. He never noticed the high fives Jim and Sasha kept on exchanging.
When she and Toby left, she stopped and shyly handed him a picture of a very tall stick figure with brown hair and a very little pink figure with blonde hair and a very angry man between them with glasses that were larger then his face. Carefully she had written 'To Jim From Sasha' in writing that took up almost a quarter of the page and got the 'J' backwards.
The third time was with the regular sitter for Toby and his wife fell through and they had waited for months to get this appointment with the marriage counsellor so Jim drove over and they played dolls before she fell asleep to Beauty and the Beast.
The fourth time it was Toby's wife who had shown up on his doorstep at sic o'clock exasperated and with a quiet, three year old Sasha in tow who was clutching a soft teddy bear to her chin and had a pink Princess backpack on.
It was after the divorce and Toby was MIA in Europe and the eighteen year old sitter she had arranged for had been picked up with a DUI, so Toby's wife really had no choice and would pay double if he would take her for the night.
Mark was out of town on a road trip with his new girlfriend, the activist, to San Francisco. He settled her watching Dora the Explorer while he changed the sheets on his bed and locked any damaging photos in his dresser, then called for pizza. At ten o'clock she changed into her Powerpuff pyjamas but couldn't sleep so she curled up with her teddy bear on the couch and dozed while he watched reruns of CSI. He covered her with a blanket his grandmother had knitted him and they both slept with her curled up on his side.
The fifth time was during her weekend with Toby and she was at a birthday party but Toby's tire had blown out while he was in New York so Jim swung by to pick her up until he could get back.
She had been so excited to see him and dragged him into the house, hunched over because she was so tiny and held his fingers too tightly for his to get away. It had been a great party, with a Pink Pony theme, pink streamers, pink party hats and a real white Pony with a pink saddle. The other mothers sat on the sides and laughed while Sasha put a party hat on him and made him sit on the ground so the other girls and her could braid his hair with the new pink hair snaps the birthday girl had gotten.
He had gotten mud on his new jeans and the pony bit his knee when he got too close but he party wound up soon and they spent the rest of the evening at Toby's house playing with her old dolls and tea set. Jim braided her hair with pink ribbons and they ate Chinese tack out for dinner until she fell asleep at the kitchen table and Jim had to carry her to bed.
Toby got home at midnight looking tired and disappointed. Jim waved off his apologies and drove home. Later that night, while he tried to ignore the thumping on the wall from Mark's room where he and his new girlfriend, the acrobat, were spending the night, he glanced across the room to the picture that Sasha had drawn him a while ago and thought of Pam.