Why I Think It’s Important to Hire a Babysitter (or Nanny)

When Flora was about four months old, Dan and I went out to dinner for my birthday. We left Flora at home with her godparents.

Yes, four months into active motherhood, and I left my baby. For all of two hours.

And yes, it was a little anxiety-provoking. Flora at four months was not the easiest baby. I worried about her crying. I had left a bottle of pumped milk for the sitters. She wasn’t a good sleeper, but she like to be held.

But I also knew I needed to celebrate my birthday and spend time alone with my husband out of the house.

I know some parents don’t leave their children with sitters. Or don’t leave their children over night. I can’t say I understand those choices. Growing up, my parents always had date nights and hired sitters. I don’t recall my grandparents babysitting us, although later when my mother was back at work full-time, her father would occasionally come stay with Dr. Sis when she was sick and couldn’t go to school. We even had a (gasp!) boy sitter occasionally! (Gosh, he was a cutie. He was the brother of one of our regular sitters. Anyhoo, I digress.)

While we still lived in the South Side, we probably mostly asked friends to babysit for us. I worked from home. About once a week, my MIL drove into the South Side so I could run around to work or do errands as needed.

And then we moved to the suburbs. Although we moved to a house next door to my in-laws, I knew that finding babysitters that weren’t my in-laws was important. Dan and I figured that it would be better to “save” his parents for emergency situations (like having a sick child and no PTO at work) and hire unrelated help.

When we first moved into the area where we live now, we relied on word-of-mouth. Dan had close friends who also had young children. They suggested a couple of sitters, a daycare, and an in-home daycare. The sitter they had suggested was a lovely young woman, and she *loved* our kids, but eventually left for college, so we needed to find a new one.

We decided to see if the teenage girl who lived across from us was interested in babysitting. She was, and we paid $40 for her to take the Red Cross babysitting course, and then employed her. She was our regular sitter for a couple of years, when she was 14 to 16. She was pretty okay; she did well with the children; Flora and Kate liked her; when it was time for her to go home, we watched her walk across the yard. Our only misgiving about her was that she texted all the damn time. But it wasn’t a deal breaker.

But she eventually got a “real” job (at an ice cream shop), and, of course, now she’s in college. Plus, after I had Michael, I had misgivings about leaving three children with a teenager. I found two children and an infant to be challenging. I didn’t think our neighbor was up for it.

However, I still needed a sitter. So I turned to the Internet.

I used SitterCity.com, and I would recommend it. They usually have free trials; I’ve also used their paid subscription services, though not for more than three months at any time. [SitterCity has not compensated me in any way for mentioning them in this post.]

Sooner or later, I’ll probably have to return to SitterCity. One of my sitters is earning her Masters degree, and my nanny is looking for year-round, full-time employment as a teacher.

Staying connected with Dan is important to me. Date nights mean a lot to us and our marriage. After all, we were married before we were parents. Additionally, because of Dan’s schedule, sometimes I need that Saturday morning sitter so I can go get a pedicure or bikini wax. Being able to leave my children with people who care well for them means peace of mind for mom (and dad). We have to put it in our budget, and we can’t be all that spontaneous — sitters need to be asked in advance — but the investment in good help is invaluable.

While parenthood is a life-long commitment, the actual direct care of children eventually fades away. Some day, our children will be old enough to be left to their own devices when Dan and I go out. Some day, we won’t need sitters at all, because the children will have flown the nest. While I am sure I will miss them, by employing sitters regularly now, I get to stay intimate with my husband, participate in social outings (with or without my husband), and take “me time” when needed. I’m lucky to have the option to employ babysitters and nannies now.

Related post: The Great Nanny Experiment of 2012

Who’s your babysitter? How did you find her (or him)?

Ten Things to Consider When Hiring a Sitter or Nanny

1. When do you want your baby sitter to be available? If you need a reliable sitter for Friday and Saturday nights, be explicit about that. If you need the occasional weeknight sitter, you don’t want to hire one that has nighttime classes during the week. Same thing with weekends; if you need a sitter during the day on a Saturday or Sunday, you need to know if the person you are hiring is going to regularly have a conflict.

[Of course, you can hire more than one sitter. We have two reliable sitters, one of whom has also been our summer time nanny the past two years.]

2. How old is the sitter? A high-school age sitter can’t be beat for enthusiasm (or one would hope) and availability. However, a college-age sitter may be more experienced and more responsible — and will probably want more money.

3. How much are you willing to pay? As with anything involving childcare, nannies and sitters can be expensive. We pay from $10 to $15 an hour, depending on experience. Let’s face it, we have three kids, and someone not blood related to them should be well compensated for containing the chaos.

4. What do you want the sitter to do? Aside from make sure the children don’t kill each other or set the house on fire? This ranges from basics (change diapers, feed, give baths, put to bed) to more detailed responsibilities. I ask my baby sitters to help the children clean up the house; if they feed the children, I ask that the kitchen be cleaned. Our nanny helps the children do all the chores I request of them: change sheets, vacuum, put laundry away. I honestly think they listen to her better than they do to me.

So, when I interview a sitter, I always ask about what I call light housekeeping, and give them an idea of what I mean. This is another area that a college age person is better than a teen, generally speaking.

5. Does the sitter have a car, and if so, is she comfortable driving the children? This, again, can be an invaluable asset. If you have date night scheduled, and a classmate’s birthday party invite comes in, can the sitter take the child? During the summer, our nanny took the children to swim lessons, drove them to the park, did all kinds of things. I prefer a sitter that has her own transportation.

6. Ask them what they will do with the children. One of my sitters loves doing arts and crafts with the children. My nanny loves taking them outside, or to places like Fun Fore All. Sure, sometimes they are going to sit and watch a movie. But if you have strict rules about screen time, you want to know what a sitter has up her sleeve to keep the kids occupied.

7. Make your discipline guidelines clear. Make sure the sitter has the backbone to back up her requests for compliance. What will she do when the 3-year-old throws a tantrum? How about when the 9-year-old says she wants to stay up and wait for you to get home? Sitters should be able to be firm. We believe in timeouts and a system of rewards/loss of privileges, and we make sure our sitters have the tools they need to keep the children in line if needed.

8. One of the things I asked my potential nannies was, “Think of a time you had an emergency. What did you do?” That was instructive for me. It’s good to know if a caregiver is going to have a cool head.

9. This seems obvious, but ask about experience. Some sitters only have experience with infants. Some only sit for older children. What are they in school for? Our nanny has a degree in education, and a Masters degree in mathematics. Our other sitter is in college for early education with an emphasis in arts. It’s good to know that they are so interested in children that they want to participate in teaching.

10. This also seems obvious, but ask for references, and then call them. I find calling people I barely know to talk about a person I also barely know (yet) to be nerve-racking, but you have to do it. What ages were the kids when she (or he, rare but possible) babysat? What kinds of things did she do with them? What was she good at? Did she have any weak points? People I talked to about our nanny could not say nice enough things about her, all of which I have found to be true, too. She really likes children, and for some reason, she really likes my children too!

The easiest ways to find sitters are through word of mouth and the Internet. We’ve gotten good baby sitters both ways, and our current regular sitters I found at SitterCity.com (I am not being compensated by SitterCity in any way for this post). They have guidelines there, too, about what to ask, and the people who post there to be employed provide a lot of appropriate information.

I find having sitters to be important for a variety of reasons. And I’ll get into that in my next post!

How about it, parents? Or baby sitters? Did I leave anything out?

The Great Nanny Experiment of 2012

Last May, when school was ending and summer time was rolling around, I realized I didn’t want to spend my mornings rousting my children out of bed to take them to daycare.

As far as I saw it, I had two choices:

1. Quit my job.
2. Hire a nanny.

We went with the second option. (The first is always very, very tempting.)

It was the right decision.

I’m not sure I will be able to adequately express the difference having a nanny made in my life. But I’m going to try.

Before I start to gush, I will state upfront that she wasn’t perfect. Kerry (not her real name) likes country music, which is probably about the only genre of music I don’t like. My kids learned some country songs over the summer, and also learned that “po-po” is slang in some circles for “police”. We’ll call it “broadening their horizons”.

Kerry also… how do I say this delicately? She could have chosen more modest clothing. Kerry is a big-boned, curvy girl, and likes short jean shorts and tank tops. I’m not sure if I had the right to say anything about this. (What say you, readers?)

Okay, the cons out of the way: OH MY GOSH, I WISH KERRY COULD BE OUR NANNY YEAR ROUND. SHE MADE A HUGE DIFFERENCE IN MY LIFE AND THE KIDS’ LIVES THIS SUMMER.

I’m not sure how much my children appreciate the fact that they didn’t have to go to daycare this summer. They slept in every morning (except that one time Flora got up at 2 a.m.). They played with their cousins several times a week (my niece and nephew were over Bella and Tadone’s quite often). They were able to take swim lessons.

Kerry had no problem driving the kids around. We installed carseats in her back seat, and she took them to the zoo, the Aviary, the mall, the park, the pool, and so on. She bought them little gifts. One night, she even took the girls to the Butler County Fair — they had a blast, of course.

This is what hiring a nanny did for me, though:

First, mornings were a breeze. I got up, got ready, got out the door. I didn’t have to herd the children out of bed, to the kitchen table, back upstairs to get dressed; I didn’t have to hassle my husband about getting out of bed. I came downstairs, poured myself some coffee, and drove to work.

It was a lovely, quiet time.

Second, after work I got home an entire hour earlier than I do during the school year. I didn’t have to run around picking up the children from their school and daycares. We had an extra hour to play games, go for walks, read books or do crafts. Evenings were *relaxing*, not the usual mad dash to bedtime.

Third, my house was clean. So clean. Kerry guided the girls through picking up the house, putting clean dishes and clean laundry away, making their beds. She got them to vacuum, she showed them how to load the dishwasher. And so when I came home at 4:30 p.m., things were neat and organized. It was so… light to come home to a picked up house. I breathed more easily, I didn’t feel so overwhelmed.

Lastly were little odds and ends I could depend on Kerry for: tiny errands to pick up dry cleaning or groceries, having the kids bake or make pizza dough, running them to meet me at the mall when I had an eye appointment. It’s probably all these little things that assumed the most weight. The fact that I neither had to bug Dan nor do it myself — stop for milk, grab a birthday card, handle two children while the other one had an appointment.

Sometimes, moms joke about “having a wife”. Whether we work full-time or part-time outside of the home, or are home full-time with our children, sometimes we wish for another body to send on errands, another body to occupy one or two children while we do laundry or cook dinner — or conversely, a body to do the chores while we watch the kids. In most households, we moms still take on the majority of housework and childcare. Even though dads are more involved, it’s still not a 50-50 split in most households. So sometimes we wish for that third body. (Or telekinesis — just me?)

Having a nanny — a childcare worker who came to the house — was like having a wife for me. It was rather glorious.

Overall, of course, and most importantly, Kerry was great with the kids. She interacted with them, guided them through their day, keeping them busy with fun and with chores. Michael adored her. Kate and Flora listened to her (there was an end-of-summer dust-up) and enjoyed being with her. She really loved them (and has already offered to babysit when we need her).

So, I can easily forgive her for teaching my kids a couple of country songs. I’m not sure, if she weren’t a teacher and could work for us year-round, how we would have kept her on. It sure would be nice if she could pick up the girls from school and get their homework underway. But as it is, we’ll have to muddle along without her… (I have some ideas about that).

Do you sometimes wish for a wife?