The Mom Crowd

Finding a reliable, energetic babysitter or nanny can be quite a challenge these days. When I was in high school, I remember competing to be “THE sitter” with many other high school girls. I babysat all the time and made quite a bit of cash. Now that I am a mom, it seems like there just aren’t as many eager young teens and college age gals looking for babysitting gigs.

I posted last week about creating a babysitter handbook, but that’s just not very valuable if you don’t have a babysitter! Here’s some ideas on where to find a great babysitter.

• Church – check with your college/young singles pastor or youth group leader at church for names of people who may be interested in babysitting!
• Local colleges – Most colleges have job banks where outsiders can post job opportunities for the students. This is how I found one of our regular babysitters!
• Tell EVERYONE you know! – You never know when your child’s soccer coach has a next door neighbor who is looking for a great babysitting gig!
• Homeschooling groups – Check your local homeschool group for reliable high schoolers who want to sit for families. The great thing about hiring a homeschooler is they are sometimes more flexible in their schedules. If you need a Friday morning sitter, you may be able to find a trusty 17 year old who is free on Friday mornings this way!
• Your local gym/day care center/karate class/music class/etc.. – Check with people who are already in the caregiving business, and even better, check with people who are already caring for YOUR children! The child care worker at the gym or your child’s day care teacher may be looking for some extra cash on the weekends or evenings. Scoop them up!
• Nanny or Babysitting websites-I don’t have any experience with this route, but you can join a website similar to this site or this site and have access to babysitters and nannies in your area, their contact information, their resumes, and their availability.

When you’ve found a couple candidates, there’s a few things you can do to make sure they are a good fit before inviting them into your home.

• Have a phone interview. If you need specific, regular times for the babysitter to work, make sure they are available when you need them. Also, confirm pay over the phone and if they have transportation.
• Meet them face to face. My mother-in-law met with our potential nanny at Starbucks and bought her a drink and discussed in more detail why she was wanting a nanny position and what made her qualified to care for children. My mother-in-law is super laid back, so it really was perfect to have her there. Other MIL’s may not be a great person to take on this interview. If you want to have someone else there if you’re husband is not available, ask a close friend. It’s always good to get someone else’s input on something like this.
• After the first meeting, I invited our potential nanny over to meet the children and see how she interacted with them. Prior to this, I offered her the job contingent on how she and the kids interacted and on her background check results. All went GREAT and we found ourselves a great nanny!

The most important part of finding a great babysitter is not letting them go when you find them! Pay them competitive rates and make sure you are not micromanaging them. Make them feel very appreciated and never take advantage of them! Happy hunting!

Where have you found your awesome sitter or nanny? What makes your relationship work so well? Any other advice?

I don’t have a helpful or interesting topic today. I am still battling All Day Nausea. I have spent the entire weekend in bed or on the couch and I have missed two parties. In fact I haven’t left my house in over a week. Yesterday, my husband and I walked to our mailbox and I immediately threw up when we got back to the house.

Last Thursday night I broke down crying. Being sick is lonely. You don’t get to go out and see anyone. I don’t what the heck I want to eat most of the time. In fact, I don’t want to eat at all, but I know I have to for the baby and so I don’t have to get an IV. I hate that I can’t do anything around the house to help and I feel like I just boss my husband around all day. (I am sure most women would love that.) But we knew before starting the whole process of a second one, that would mean that Daniel has to do everything. He is doing a fantastic job feeding Ace and taking care of her. I try to watch Ace from the couch in the afternoons so he can at least get some work done.

So I just wanted to whine again here on The Mom Crowd. Morning sickness is really horrible. I keep thinking, “What if I can’t do this a third time and we only have 2 kids?” People say I can make it through it again, but I hate this. If my morning sickness lasts 20 weeks again like it did last time. I don’t know if I will want to try for number 3.

What I do know is that tomorrow I am 8 weeks along. In two weeks I will be able to hear my baby’s heartbeat and that will make it all worth while. But I still have two weeks of vomiting and hating food to go.

P.S. As I wrote this up I smelled the dry cat food and totally threw up my lime sherbert. Oh, I did get some meds. The Zofran works really well, but my insurance would only give me 12 pills every thirty days. I may have to call back my doc’s office to push it through insurance. When I called last week they gave me Phinagrin(sp?). I took it Saturday morning and it knocked me off my butt and I slept all day.

Thanks for letting me whine again.

Recently our family had the opportunity to take a little vacation (or vay-cay, as I’ve been continuously calling it) to Panama City Beach, Florida.  We have not gone anywhere together as a family in about a year, and we were due some days of quiet away from home.  Thankfully, a family from our church let us use their beach house free of charge!  So we loaded up our car and hit the road.

The house we were in was perfect for the kids.  They were so enamored with the sun room up front that they weren’t the least bit interested in opening the cabinet doors and nooks & crannies throughout the house.  We brought one baby gate, which was perfect to block them out of the bathroom; they had free reign everywhere else.  It was a little one-level bungalow right across the street from the water.  All we had to do was cross the street and hike through about 10 yards of sand to see the waves.  To top it off, the beach was “private”!  So there was no one else around for great distances.  Nice!

The first morning we were there, we suited up and got lathered in our sunscreen, donning our hats and looking good.  I even had a new swimsuit to wear (Wow!  We’re talking 3 years, people, since I’ve cared about that at all…)  The kids were ecstatic to use their new sand shovel and beach toys.  I brought a blanket, Dave remembered the umbrella for shade.  We were set.  I was thinking we’d be there for a couple of hours and then go back to the house for lunch.

Except that two hours was about 90 minutes too long.  Turns out, the kids were kinda freaked out by the waves and had no interest in getting wet.  This didn’t stop me from trying to get them in the water, mind you.  I held Eli and tried to let him get a little cooled off as the waves lapped up.  One little splash of saltwater on his face was all it took to convince him he didn’t like it.  They weren’t quite sure what to do about the sand, either, though that was easier for them to handle.  And boy, was it hot.  Upper 90s, sticky and humid.  The only enjoyment Dave and I found was when we could individually step away for quick little dips into the water.  (My swimsuit was great – stayed in place and everything!  Score!)

After 20 minutes of playing in the sand, Lucy was soaked from sweat.  Poor girl was so hot.   But she was not going in that water.  It became clear that if we weren’t going to swim, we might as well go back to the house.  Otherwise, we were going to melt away into the Gulf.  We didn’t have access to a swimming pool, which would have changed the way we spent our days completely.  Instead, we cleaned ourselves up and decided to see what else the beach town had to offer, which turned out to be a lot.  We enjoyed fun window shopping and cruising along the strip, and the kids weren’t too traumatized to head back to our beach in the evening hours to collect sea shells and watch the sun go down. 

On our last day, we decided to drive a little further east and see St. Andrews Park.  We didn’t know what we were going to find, honestly, but we brought a picnic lunch.  It turns out we should have brought our swimsuits, too, because we found this:

It was utterly kid-friendly, this little wading area for families.  It was like “Beach for Beginners”, and Lucy loved it.  She and Dave wandered around for awhile and ended up swimming in their clothes for about an hour.  Oh, how I wished we knew about this from the start!  We would have done this on the first day and then she probably would have warmed up to the “big waves” at our beach not much longer after that.  Eli would have enjoyed sitting around in the shallowest parts of the water with me, too.  Oh well.  Maybe next time.

Looking back, I realized we did lots of things right on our kids’ first beach trip:

• We packed everything we needed for beach fun: towels, blankets, toys, sunscreen, beverages, and the camera.
• We knew not to include eating while on the beach.  Nothing’s worse than a sand-covered snack!  We scheduled beach time around eating times.
• We kept a flexible and positive attitude with every activity.
• We all looked really good.  Seriously, we’re a family with good fashion sense.   (Okay, I’m reaching, here…)

Here is what I learned to do for next time:

• Research what there is to do before leaving home!  Had we done this, we would have known how to introduce beachy fun to our young ones in a more effective manner.
• If possible, go in a month when it’s not quite as hot.  The water was a great temperature for swimming, but it was sweltering outside of it.  We looked for shade at every opportunity.

Some links on the subject:

• 10 Tips for Your Beach Vacation
• Packing Tips for Beach Trips
• Tips for Taking Your Toddler to the Beach
• Little Toddler Beach Bums

What about you, moms?  How have your beach endeavors fared this summer?  Any stories or tips that you’d like to share?

I got this idea from an online friend a while ago and I thought I’d share it with you guys. This is a very easy and fun craft to make. It makes a great gift for a friend or grandparent and your kids can be big helpers too!

I found all the supplies at Walmart except for one (noted below).

Here are the supplies you need:

• Clear, glass, flat marbles–usually found in the floral section
• 3/4″ magnet rounds–can be found in the craft section
• Clear Silicone Adhesive–in the hardware section
• 1/2″ hole punch–found at Joanne’s or Michaels
• Small pictures found in magazines, your own pictures, clip art from the computer, letters printed out from your computer etc. (Use you imagination!)

Directions:

1. Use the 1/2″ hole punch to punch out pictures of your choosing. If you don’t want to use a whole punch then you can just use scissors. But, the hole punch takes a lot less time and kids like doing that part too.
2. Squirt a pea size amount on the back of the marble. Put it on top of the picture and press down until the silicone spreads over the whole image.
3. Wait a few minutes for the silicone to dry and then attach the marbles to the magnets using a small amount of silicone. Wait for them to dry and you are finished!

We made some for my niece’s birthday. We picked out a cool font on the computer and spelled her name. We cut out the letters and made the magnets so she would have her own special magnets to hang up her stuff on their refrigerator. I made a black background with hot pink letters and it turned out really cool. I wish I had a picture of it!

The cool thing about the glass pebbles is that they end up magnifying the picture so even though it looks really small when you cut it out, it looks really neat when you are finished.

Buying all the supplies cost me less than $20. The special hole puncher cost almost as much as all the other supplies put together. But, I have enough supplies to make a ton of magnets! This is a simple, fun, inexpensive, and easy craft. I hope you have fun making it to!

I recently fell in love with Seeqpod. Seeqpod is a Web 2.0 application that allows users to create playlists with music, videos, and rich media files.  Creating an account is completely easy and fast. Once you are in you search for the song you are looking for and Seeqpod finds it in a file that is already online and streams it. Then you click on the arrow of the song you want and add it to your list.  It is totally legal, this is from their about page:

Our technology is legal, and we diligently observe industry-standard DMCA regulations for search engines, otherwise known as .information location tools.. We do not support, nor facilitate, illegal downloading, and we do not host files. But, we do support artists and makers on and offline.

You can’t download a song, but you can listen to the entire song before you go buy the song on iTunes. You can listen to your mix while you are online or if you have a computer with an internet connection near by. I love bringing my laptop into the kitchen and playing my Seeqpod mixes while doing dishes.

Once you have created your playlist you can embed the player into your site. It doesn’t start playing automatically when your site loads. Your readers can chose to hit play themselves.

Not every song can be found in Seeqpod, but most of the popular songs can be found. Also, I added one song to my list only to find that it didn’t have the full ending, so I had to find another listing of my song. Remember you don’t have to be a great music aficionado to use it, just play what you like!

I first used the program to create my playlist for Myra’s Mix Tape Mondays.  If you haven’t checked it out yet – you must! Dawn and I were recently feautured. So you have to go to her blog to hear our mixes. I have listened to mine at least 20 times. I love my mix (if I don’t say so myself.)

Amanda’s Mix

Dawn’s Mix

If you create one and post it on your blog let us know!