A Nanny Named Fran

We hired a nanny! Unfortunately, her name isn't actually Fran, but how cool would that have been if it was?!

I work night shifts, and have to sleep in the mornings when I get home. The kids obviously can't run wild, so we enlisted the help of our fam. My mom only works half days on Thursdays, and has Fridays off, so she watches the kids for us then. My SIL was watching them for us on Wednesdays. It was awesome having free babysitting, but unfortunately, it wasn't working out with SIL :( She is going to school full time, and working, and looking for a different job, so it was making it pretty difficult. M and I talked about it, and decided that a nanny would be a better option then daycare.

Daycares have their pros, don't get me wrong, but for what we where wanting, it just wasn't for us. We only need 1 day a week, and only for about 5 hours. Plus, Miss L has her immune deficiency, so she really can't be around germs/sick people, which is pretty much the definition of daycare. Also, getting the girls to daycare would be tricky since my sleeping time is limited as it is, and M takes Pumpkin to school and then has to get to work on time. And, I am BF LL. Yes, I know you can send BM to daycare, but typically LL only gets one bottle while I sleep, then I wake and feed her the other times to keep my supply up. So a nanny made sense.

Finding one was the harder part. How do you hire a complete stranger to come into your home and take care of your children? I don't know. Still don't. But we tried a couple things. One thing I did was call the local college and talked to the lady that runs the early childhood development program and asked if she knew of any students that would be willing to do it. Seemed like a good place to start since these kids are going to school for just that. No luck there though. Second I contacted a local nanny agency to see if the could help place a nanny. Of course they could! For $800. Ha! I wish I had that much extra laying around. So last, I did what I thought I would NEVER do. I posted an add on Care.com. Sneaky little site though, if you want to contact any potential nannies, you have to pay. I didn't, but prayed that someone would contact me. And they did! You can only respond to the first person to contact you for free, but that was all we needed. We did get a couple of people interested, but ended up only talking to the first lady and hiring her.

Maybe we should have interviewed a few more, but I really didn't want to pay to even have to respond to them. :/ And truthfully, the first lady was/is amazing! Her first day was today, and everything seemed to go really good! She had great references, our schedules work out good, and she is really sweet and kind and did my dishes and laundry! I think I might love our nanny...