As a Mom of three kids finding a babysitter has been a challenge more than once and for more reasons than I can count! Recently though Jimmy and I sat discussing the fact that we hadn't been out on a date since we moved, which was last JUNE!! Yeah, tell me about it! We were both in NEED of some time with JUST us!!!
For those that have walked this same path, you know how tough it can be to find a RESPONSIBLE, RELIABLE, AFFORDABLE, young lady to watch your most important treasures! Tough is actually an understatement, sometimes it seems near impossible, does that combination of traits even exist in a single person? My friends and I have had many discussions in this very matter and we often discuss the "Not so good" experiences and the "decent" experiences with the local crop of teen aged girls to select from. I know that we have often had to settle for the one we know will watch the kids, interact with them and keep them alive and surrender to that fact that our house will look like a bomb went off when we return!! To be fair I have not used any of the girls here locally but before we moved we had found 1 PERFECT babysitter, but she was in high demand so you had to book her well in advance! Our children LOVED her, she played with them, kept our house clean and she was 17, she was the HOLY GRAIL of Babysitters!! Moving away was difficult knowing we would be starting again, thus the reason we had not been out since!!
There are several couples out here that participate in babysitting co-ops, which can be very handy, but as many of us found out a few weeks ago that doesn't always work out if you all want to go out together! We recently had several couples that went out to dinner and finding enough babysitters to go around got tricky and when ours was unable to do it a few days before we decided to use the gift of having a mature 11 year old in our own house!! HALLELUJAH!! I contacted a close neighbor and let her know that Lexi would be babysitting and made sure she would be around if there was a problem, we also weren't going too far away and figured this was the perfect opportunity to ease her in!! The night couldn't have gone better, Lexi knows the rules of our home, she knows when and how to put the other two in bed, which snacks they can eat, which movies they can watch and how to work the DVD player and TV, it really makes the fact that I started young in child rearing pay off, let me tell you!! It made the pain of babysitters past, who broke small appliances, talked on the phone, left HUGE messes, yelled at my kids, let them stay up until we got home etc. etc. etc. , dissipate and this whole new world has been opened before us! Evening walks, trips to the ice cream store, or Target, just the two of us, ahhhh, I get giddy just thinking about it!!
Now I realize that many do not have the luxury of having a built-in babysitter, and there will still be times when we won't want to leave Lexi on her own. So how do you find your babysitters? What Kind of bad things have happened? Do you have the PERFECT babysitter? Or do you just leave your kids with your Dog?
