the great nanny search, 10 weeks

Not technically a picture of our nanny.

It’s hard to say when I knew it wasn’t a good fit. But my money is on, oh I don’t know, the moment she went running down the hallway, dramatically locked herself in our bathroom, and screeched that she just KNEW our dog was going to bite her. (Spoiler: our sweet, but energetic, Labrador retriever did not bite her. Or anyone.).

And that was just the beginning.

She did refer to our son as “papa” (as in, puh-PAH), which was a definite selling point.

Alas, the great nanny search of 2014. C went back to work six weeks in and I put on my working-mother-tiara full time next week. HARK! CHILDCARE!

We’ve gone back and forth on the best option for us and for Ezra. C works crazy hours including, in the next five months alone, two full months of thirty hour, overnight shifts. My schedule is less GITMO-esque-sleep-deprivation, but there are still many days when I am out of the house for going on 10-12 hours. <Parents of the year, right here>

So, ultimately, we decided that YES, we do want to commit approximately 95% of our income to the great child care abyss (do you hear that sucking sound?). Enter: Mary Poppins nanny.

Of course, being a thirty year old amateur lawyer and fly-by-night internet blogger, I am absolutely unqualified to employ anyone. So we asked the internet what to do we muddled our way through.

There’s something very bizarre about interviewing nannies. You invite them into your home and within seconds of meeting them, you hand over the most precious thing you’ve ever created[1]. Then they sit there, holding, swaddling, singing to and trying their hardest to soothe your screamy, downy headed infant in an effort to win you over while you stumble through inane questions like what do you love most about newborns? and will you help us with a nap schedule? or maybe, if you’re feeling bold, can you tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a previous employer and how you resolved it? <said with great confidence, though conscious that I appear roughly 13 years old and am not qualified to be asking a middle aged woman ANY of these things>.

It’s like a deranged form of speed dating where one of you smells like a urine soaked milk carton and the other pretends not to care.[2]

Needless to say, we hired someone. It wasn’t the first applicant, fan of our dog though she was. So now we have a nanny. *gulp*

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[1] The paper mache clown I made in forth grade coming in at a very close second.

[2] I’ll let you guess which is which.