Category Archives: Nanny

A Good Day

March 5, 2007

Gather round kittens, what better way to start off the week than by taking a nice walk down memory lane.

Recall the good old days of high school. Back in the day, the sorts of things that made for a great day for me were things like my parents not embarrassing me in front of my friends, my sisters not annoying me, not getting any extra assignments in school and fabulous weekend plans filled with gossip and booze in my future. Ahh, the good old days.

Then came college and the sorts of things that made for a good day, well, they didn’t change that much from high school except my parents weren’t there to embarass me and my sisters weren’t there to annoy me. I still didn’t want any extra assignments from teachers and I still had weekend plans filled with gossip, men and booze. Add in the fact that my weekends started a bit earlier than high school. And then mix in how much breakfast for dinner in the dorms would really brighten a gal’s day and I was happy!

Into my early 20s, the pieces of a good day changed a bit. Things like a promotion at work, enough money at the end of a pay period to buy some milk and cereal without counting pennies, random fun Tuesday night’s out and a few extra dimes for a fun top from the Gap, and I was happy!

As time marched on, good days continued to change. Enter in a boyfriend, enter in a future husband, enter in more money, enter in a better apartment, and good days came with surprise gifts of flowers or presents from my soon-to-be husband. Or how about a fancy meal out on the town, a random and last-minute planned trip to Miami. Ahh, life was good. This continued into the early years of my marriage. I mean, who doesn’t love flowers for no reason, or a get-away weekend somewhere warm and relaxing? Long meals with great wine? Right?  A nap on the couch on Sunday after reading the papers? Ahh yes. Those are the kinds of things that make a good day, great.

And then came pregnancy. Little did I realize or fully appreciate that with pregnancy comes the last 10 months of my life where I, and everyone else around me, is focused on ME! How I feel, what I’m doing, how hard I’m working, if I had to wake up to pee one too many times that night – all these things mattered to me and my husband, my parents, antidepressants even some of my friends. It was important, I was important. I was a delicate flower carrying precious cargo. ME. I mattered and others wanted to hear all about it.  What made for a good day started to change a bit, however, because gone went the fancy bottles of wine, gone went the last minute trips as I headed into my third trimester, but the nice meals out, the movies, time to shop for myself, and time to complain about how I felt and what was bothering me – all these things were still there. ME, me and me. I could obsess over myself, and you better believe, I did. I would drive to work and lament over how many times I was bothered by waking to go to the bathroom. I thought that meant I had a rough night’s sleep. HA! What a joke!  I failed to realize that I could then just return to bed and lie there without having to hold my breath and pray the baby woudn’t hear and wake up. I could just lay there and do nothing. I had no idea.  And believe you me,  I never bothered to stop and hear the clock ticking faster and the time running out on those good old days. Mais non! The days of yore, the days of MOI.

And now, here I am, a working mom. And I’m quite sure every other working mom out there will agree – what makes a good day? What is it that we want? What is the little secret to make us all happy and peace to exist throughout the land? Forget the crap about balance. Mais non, kittens.

It’s really quite simple – sure, flowers are nice. Sure, my husband thinking to stop and get some milk on his way home without even being reminded is like adding dark chocolate sauce to the dessert. But that’s not necessary. All I need for a good day is this: for things to go as planned. For the nanny to show up on time, for the baby to be healthy, for the traffic to not add two hours to my commuting time – that’s it. I don’t need or even want anything special. I just want a drama-free day with no added surprises.

I’m pretty sure that no one warned me that my expectations would be so low by my 30s. But really – I’m fine with that. A day that goes as planned is the perfect day now.

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Husbands, Motherhood, Nanny

Nanny Spy Games

March 1, 2007

The high stakes world of hiring and training a new nanny is one that involves quick-decision making skills, finely honed gut instincts, and a willingness to get your Jimmy Choo’s a little muddy. Those who make slow decisions and are too much of a ninny to spy, need not apply. C’est vrai.

And for those of you on the edge of your seat for a nanny update chez moi, the latest breaking news is that we did, in fact, hire a nanny. Mais oui! I can hear your deep yoga exhalations of great relief, happening, across the land!

For an insider’s look into the fast-paced, high stakes underworld of hiring a nanny, read on, dear kittens. It is not for the faint of heart.

First, to all of you indecisive, slowsky’s out there – step aside and know this, when attempting to hire a nanny who meets all of your criterion, the good ones all share two traits:

  1. They want to work and now. They don’t have time to waste for you to think on it a bit. If you think you have some special unique benefit to offer that will buy you some time, think again. We all do.
  2. Someone else is lurching in the dark corners of your nanny’s email inbox and voice mail, waiting to spring and hire them the second you turn your back and take a minute to mull it all over.

So, back to hiring our new nanny. How we found her is truly just plain weird but we found her. She is legal, she speaks great English, she will continue speaking Spanish to our darling daughter throughtout the day, she came with glowing reviews and good experience. And she passed the ultimate test, our daughter.

Which brings me to last night. To add to the stress of the week, I arrived home only to take one look at the baby and know she was sick. Then I touched her forehead and thought I might have gotten a third-degree burn. Turns out the MMR shot they get at 15 months can spark a fever exactly 7 days after they receive the shot. And well, that is precisely what happened to my baby, complete with a 103 fever, her highest fever to date.

And so, the new nanny arrived for her interview,  I knew immediately that I would like to hire her (recall my earlier posting on trusting your gut instinct), and as part of the process, I made up an excuse to leave the room so that I could spy on her interactions with my daughter.

The real test was – how would darling daughter with her 103 temperature respond to this virtual stranger in my absence? In retrospect, I couldn’t have asked for a better test – a better coincidence couldn’t have come my way – a sick baby faced with a prospective new nanny.

So back to my test, which who am I kidding, was most likely not that subtle or discreet. Darling daughter was happily sitting on nanny’s lap, reading her musical Elmo book, in my absence. Clearly new nanny is up to it.

But here is the real lesson in today’s posting, dear kittens: Spying.  Any self-respecting mother spies and coordinates ambush visits to the house when a new nanny is present until a comfort level is reached. Not a one-of-us is above lurking in bushes, peering in windows, and generally behaving like your creepy neighborhood peeping tom. Additionally, ambush visits and random acts of spying should intermittently continue as time passes and comfort levels are reached with said nanny. Note to the CIA – locate any neighborhood mom if you need an expert spy.

But dear kittens, what is bothering me now is not our decision to hire said nanny, it is the continued emails I keep receiving from other prospective nannies that I reached out to yesterday afternoon. After-all, one never knows how an interview will turn out, so I kept the emails and phone calls going.

And so here I sit, surely I must be more relaxed because we have hired a new nanny and she seems fabulous. And yet, my mind is racing and my stomach is in knots each time I receive another email from another contender. What if she is better? What if she has more experience? What if I like her more? How will I ever know?

The most recent one congratulated us on finding our new nanny, wished me luck and ended her email with “kisses to your baby.”

Be still my heart.

How could she not be perfect?

Do I bring them over to satiate my curiosity, or do I just let them know the position is filled and move on? Will it continue to gnaw away at me? Have I really become this person? Have I really become a second-guesser? A doubter? Is it really moi? Have I suddenly become a commitment-phobic man? How can I go from making such an important decision, rather quickly and with such confidence one day, to entertatining the emails from other nannies today?

And on that note, you better believe that I have my plan of ambush home visits drawn up, alerted the generals, and am ready to move full steam ahead with the nanny spy-games next week. Dark glasses and trench-coats, need not apply. Spying mom’s aren’t afraid to get their heels a little muddy.

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Husbands, Motherhood, Nanny

Zen is dead to me

February 27, 2007

I knew the zen from yesterday’s ordeal was slipping through my fingers when I quickly starting pounding glasses of wine last night after we put our darling daughter to bed. They say denial is the first sign of being anti-zen. Yeah…umm…. Not so much on the zen if you are turning to the bottle….that’s what they say anyway.

And then, I knew my zen was yesterday’s news this morning at 3:45am when I awoke with a horrid stomach ache and anxiety rising in my chest…..unable to return to sleep until around 5:30am.

 That’s when it hit me – just like Kitty-Time’s friend, www.selfmademom.net, has blogged about, the nanny breakup is hard on the heart and the mind. But this time, I was broken up with. I didn’t get to break up with her first.

I might have thought I was all big and bad with my Monday morning lecture. But really – I was just spewing around a lot of hot air..and nanny was probably wondering why I don’t brush my teeth before mouthing off on a Monday morning!

Oh no – zen is no longer my middle name….and I was broken up with yesterday.

And really, while I’m not passing notes in Biology class about all the ways she was wrong for us, it seems that this blog is really just the replacement. Isn’t this basically my version of writing it on the wall? Didn’t someone say that life is really just an extension of 7th grade?

While I was up at 3:45am, blaming my husband’s bad dinner and the sauce on my stomach ache, I had plenty of time to muse…and let’s not forget..poke my husband to let him know that I was up and couldn’t sleep and am very anxious. Meanwhile, he uttered something inaudible and continued snoring…again…much to my chagrin.

To yesterday’s point, he is loving and wonderful and supportive, but he can sleep like a baby through all of this because he knows that I will do the leg work to find the next Mary Poppins. Why do husband’s get away with this? They get to show up one day and pick the nanny, sorta like they get to just show up to the hospital and just get a baby. Meanwhile, we do all the heavy lifting.

And so, back to being broken up with. The relationship with the nanny really is like your teen boyfriend. It starts off wonderful. You love one another. You are exploring new territory, you chat in the morning, you laugh about in-laws and husbands. And then time passes and there are days you want to fire her because your baby goes to her before you. The foreplay and flirting – oh that’s cholesterol lowering over with when that happens. By that point, Kitty’s claws are out, and they are sharpened.

 Then you settle into a routine and things start to get a little too comfortable. You see the areas where she’s slacking, you see where things have gotten a little lax, but it’s a power struggle and ultimately, she holds the upper hand. She knows you need her. And so you look the other way. Meanwhile, each evening you knit-pick all the things she did wrong that day, while your husband pretends to listen, or you call your mom and together you trade secrets of all the nanny’s flaws. You feed off each other. Ain’t life grand?

For me, I knew I had hit rock bottom on the night after her kid puked all over my brand new, velvet 2-day old couches and I found myself calling her that night to assure her everything was OK and not to worry about it and just have a nice vacation. And come back!

When you catch yourself doing these things, you know something has gone awry. You have lost touch with reality. You are over-compensating for the relationship’s flaws.

When my nanny failed to return from a 6-week vacation on-time, with no phone call alerting us to the new arrival date, I went into full-blown panic mode and almost went into cardiac arrest. Again, how did I not see that this relationship was no longer healthy? But what I did do then was mourn the loss of her. I went through the emotions of sadness, anger and fear. She beat me down. So that when she did return late, and rather apologetically, I was over her.

I realized that there was an end to our relationship and that chapter was closing soon.

But I pulled the ultimate dating move. I tried to show her that there was a new sheriff in town, take back my status as boss-man, and redefine our relationship with new rules. Only to find out that she had one for me. She was ready to take it to the final level and just end it.

And so, here I am. Licking my wounds. Really – she broke up with me before I broke up with her.

And I’m left wondering, it was me, not her? What’s wrong with my daughter? Could she really have it better anywhere else? How could she beat me to it?

Will I find another one? A better one? A more reliable nanny? What if no available nannies want us?

Time will tell, kittens, but it’s pretty clear that zen is so dead to me. It’s so February 26th, and panic and anxiety – are so February 27th.

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Motherhood, Nanny

It happened

February 26, 2007

Here we are,  a week away from our one-year anniversary with our nanny, and it happened.  She quit.

And here’s the kicker, I had a whole lecture planned out. She’s missed so much work over the past month because her kid was sick and other things came up, and her cleaning has been sub-par at best, so I had this whole lecture about how things need to change, and what needs to happen, and the weaknesses in the cleaning. All of these difficult things to say that no one likes to say, let alone, what a miserable way to start a Monday morning.

And she let me go on and on.

And when I was finished, she explained that she had to quit because her kids are sick too much and she needs to be home with them.

Why she didn’t stop me from my lecture and end it – I’ll never know.

But at that point, I didn’t have it in me to say anything more, so I told my husband that our nanny is leaving us, put our daughter down for a nap and left for work.

My husband got to then play good cop. I heard him downstairs, telling our nanny how wonderful she’s been and how much we appreciate her and how sad we are to see her go, all the things that my normal self would have said if I hadn’t just finished a stupid lecture on improving things.

I tell you, nannies can be more emotionally draining than children.

Anyway, I am surprisingly calm right now – keeping a zen state – and found myself becoming THAT mother. I called our backup sitter, who, as irony would have it, just agreed on Thursday to watch someone else’s kids full time. I laid it on THICK.

I am pushing her to go back on her word and instead come watch my darling daughter. It was like I was having an out of body experience. I could almost see and hear myself more than I knew these words were coming out of my own mouth. I became that parent stealing someone else’s nanny – and doing it shamelessly.

The thing is, I know it will all work out in the end. We will find a replacement, the person will be good, there will be peace in the land.

But crises with nannies and daycare – they really rock your world. Because the baby is the center of your world and the well being of your child, is the most important thing. So a crisis with the nanny, once again, raises the issue that gnaws and chips away at me every single day – why am I working? Is it really worth it?

And also, my husband is fantastic and helpful and shares watching our daughter with me on days our nanny doesn’t come to work, but we all know who will go through the motions of finding a new nanny and interviewing. Doesn’t it seem that this falls onto the shoulders of the wife and the husband just gets to show up, no matter how helpful and supportive they are? Why is that?

I will keep you posted on how things work out, dear fans. I just don’t have it in me to be funny today.

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Motherhood, Nanny
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