The Trouble with Nannies

It’s been a few weeks since our last update and much has happened.

We had intended for Kaiya’s nanny to start a couple weeks before Sharon went back to work however that didn’t quite work out so well. Our first nanny candidate spent two days with Kaiya and at the end of every night, Kaiya would throw up. Obviously this isn’t good. We took her to the doctor just to make sure she was ok, and he confirmed she was.

Sharon spent the entire fourth day observing the nanny closely and she had a tendency to bounce the baby far more than an infant should be (leading us to believe that this was the cause). She was also a bit too “rough” and uncomfortable handling her and it was obvious that it had been some time since she had had infant experience and was out of touch. In the end, the nanny and we agreed it probably wasn’t the best fit for us.

Sharon returned to work and we brought her mother back down to fill in while we continued our search. After another battery of interviews, we found another candidate who seemed great. The only caveat being, she had an 18 month old son that she wanted to also watch over while tending Kaiya. We had some concerns but she was wonderful so we gave her a shot. After two days of her trial, she came to the conclusion that her own son was being a bit too demanding of her to take care of Kaiya properly. So she too recused herself from the position.

So now our nanny searches resumed. We asked our long-time cleaning lady if she had any contacts that might be right. She thought about it and offered that she might take a stab at nannywork. On the plus side, we trusted her, she had several grandkids that she had taken care of, so it seemed like a decent match. As it turned out though, she found she didn’t have the patience necessary for infant care, and also asked to take a pass.

So now we’ve started posting for Craig’s list again and have enlisted two “premium” (read “costly”) nanny services to try and sort this out.

Sharon’s mother has been a Godsend for us covering when we needed it. I’ve taken on a new consulting project, relaunching a former website I used to run, so I’ve been keeping extremely busy during the days as well.

This past Thursday, we flew down Sharon’s father so that he could be with the family some. We have loads of new pictures to put up too and I’m working on getting this site fully function and having image galleries working properly.