babble » blogs » Strollerderby
Strollerderby
Her qualifications are excellent. Would you hire her to watch your kids?
I’ve been looking for a babysitter. I’m using the Care.com website, combing through profiles of women in our city, checking out photos and qualifications.
My reaction to the super-cute gals hoping to be selected as caregiver to my children has surprised me.
I don’t want to hire them.
Truly, I am not the jealous type. In fact, I tend to check out women with my husband. Women are beautiful, and I am often attracted to them. I’ll nudge Serge at grocery stores if a pretty girl is in the vicinity. We even debate chests together. Real or fake? And for years I enjoyed watching women fawn over my husband as he worked it on stage with his band, Marah.
But that was before baby. Now? Well, I guess I don’t need a stone-cold hottie skulking around the house putting me to shame.
Shallow? Yes. But I’m still learning to love my thicker middle, stretch marks, and saggy mom tits and I don’t need a perky young thang bouncing around reminding me — or my husband — of how much times have changed.
When asked for a direct quote regarding how he would feel about hiring a smokin’ hottie to babysit our kids, my husband said he “prefers not to discriminate against anyone on the basis of looks” and would “absolutely hire a beautiful woman to babysit” and said he’d even “vet her himself.” Furthermore, Serge said he’d “totally be willing to pick her up and drop her off if she didn’t have her own transportation.”
When I mentioned I meant a hot male babysitter, he left the room.
I’m kidding about the conversation, of course, and I suppose I should just pull myself up by my bra straps and tell you, you generally judgmental internet strangers, why I really don’t want to hire a beautiful babysitter.
Deep breath. Continue reading »
What secrets is your babysitter keeping from you?
I’m guilty of virtually never leaving my children with a babysitter. Which is not a good thing for one’s marriage, I assure you. I am just too freaked out to leave my kids with a stranger and there isn’t really any obvious babysitter candidate where we live. Oh yeah, and I’m too lazy to go about hiring someone.
But after reading an article in Yahoo! yesterday, maybe I’m making the right choice. The article details ten things your child care provider won’t tell you. Some of them were obvious, like be sure and thank your nanny, so I dumped those and focused on those you may not have thought about. Continue reading »
Would you trust this girl with your child?
As the parent of a pre-teen, it is hard for me to imagine that she might be old enough to start babysitting. Well, at 10-years-old, she’s not. But what about next year? Or when she’s 12?
According to a new study, properly trained tweens can actually be pretty good at dealing with the types of emergencies that sometimes arise when babysitting. But at other times, they can show a frightening lack of judgment. Continue reading »
Domestic Worker's Union
Behind the recently passed bills in both halves of New York’s legislature to extend basic workplace protections to domestic workers lies a union you’ve probably never heard of: Domestic Workers United. Only in New York, and only since 1999, DWU has been working to organize domestic workers and campaign for rights that are standard in other professions and in other countries: sick days, notice or termination pay, overtime, contracts. This week’s New York Magazine profiles members and offers salacious details on a nanny/employer horror story (slapping, punching, 911). It’s not clear how–beyond moral support–a union helps in that kind of situation. What’s more interesting is how the union–and any organization of babysitters or nannies–can offer a welcome clarity to families and caregivers alike.
Continue reading »
You’ve finally found a reliable sitter who’s willing to fill in for you and your husband while you get a night out, and suddenly she’s asking if she can bring her boyfriend over, too. What do you do?
That’s the question being asked in LilSugar’s recent Mommy Dearest column. Just reading the headline, my answer was a quick, “Sorry, but no.”
A metro Atlanta babysitter kept a cool head during a home invasion last week.
When two men stormed the house with baseball bats, Lilly Thorpe worried she and the three-year-old boy she was watching would be hurt. Instead of panicking, though, Thorpe offered the men a Coke. That grace under pressure just might be what saved her.
The nature of the school bus is to make life easier on parents, but the transportation situation to and from school is giving some parents major headaches.
The problem? Schools that are trying to save themselves some time and headaches by refusing to bus kids to different houses for after-school care or to satisfy custody arrangements. Continue reading »
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
The Walt Disney Company supports Babble as a platform dedicated to honest, engaged, informed, intelligent and open conversation about parenting. However, the opinions expressed on this site are those of individual parents/writers and do not reflect the views of Disney. In addition, content provided on this site is for entertainment or informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or safety advice.
73