Babysitters

You can call me weird BUT yes my kids have basically never stayed with someone other than family (my mom) and Martha…ok I’m lieing a little bit.

When I was pregnant with Owen I remember the anxiety of THINKING about leaving my baby with a “stranger” to go back to work…mind you he was still in my belly at that point!!! And I would totally cry just thinking about it when he was a newborn (anxiety mixed with a touch of the baby blues…yes I cried a bit!).  I used to BEG my mother to retire early so I didn’t have to send him somewhere. Then BAM…I was diagnosed with cancer. The joke is I wished it upon myself…that's how bad I wanted to stay home with him.  So my “wish” was granted…I didn’t have to return to work until he was 10.5 months old (3 weeks after finishing chemotherapy).  When I returned to work we had about 2 months left of the school year…so we luckily had a girl named Hannah we used to coach (who had graduated and was a student at CSUF) be able to come to our house and take care of Owen.
Hannah did a great job with him…she kept him alive…haha we didn’t ask too much. I think she enjoyed it. That was when he was co-sleeping, so she would get to nap with him during the day (a college students dream…paid to sleep!)  He loved her and it was more than we could ask for.

 
Then the day came, the following school year, that we had to send Owen to daycare…I was nervous…but quickly felt very good about where he was at and what he was learning. More on that experience later…Owens last day at Martha’s is tomorrow. So bittersweet.  I’ll be sharing how great it was for him…and us.

 

And since we have my mom who is overly eager to get her hands on my kids…she NEVER would hesitate to offer to babysit for us.  Anytime.  Especially now that she IS retired, day or night…she’d stay with our babies for whenever we needed her to!!  We know we are EXTREMELY blessed! But since Mom is now living part-time out of the country, we knew the day would come that we’d need to get a “real babysitter”.  AND it happened last night.  Yosh and I BOTH had senior homeroom students…so we both had to attend graduation. No way to get out of it!

 

Luckily we have PLENTY of high school aged girls, more than willing to watch our kids (Yosh coaches the girls polo team!!).  But we didn’t want one girl to get mad we picked one over the other SO we went with another graduate…Brittany.

I told her to take these pictures…I knew I was gonna have to document this momentous occasion! 

And Yes I left her “instructions”….

 

I wanted her to have a base to work with…our nightly routine. I kept telling her if she did things differently I was ok with that…BUT here was how I did things. heehee.  Does that sound bossy?? Didn’t mean for it to be. Really I didn’t!

And I’m pleased to say Brittany did GREAT! Got my kids fed, played with, bathed, and put one (the hard one) to bed! So much relief to know we have a responsible young person to take care of our bundles of joy!!

Gotta get this in their baby books! lol ;)