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Strollerderby
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.
Sometimes being a nanny is a sweet gig. I spent my summers during grad school hanging out on a posh resort island with a couple of adorable kids and their sweet mom, writing my thesis in the evenings and playing with the girls while Mama got in some tennis time with her sisters.
Sometimes, being a nanny isn’t so great. Employers have been known to seize immigrant nannies passports to prevent them from leaving, to require 24/7 on-call status, to pay as little as $2 an hour for what I can assure you is grueling work, and to provide living quarters most of us wouldn’t expect our pets to put up with.
And for the most part, they can get away with it. A proposed New York law would change that. Continue reading »
A British psychiatrist and author says that moms who employ nannies are setting their sons up for a life of secret trysts, office hook-ups and embarrassing voicemails left for women with funny names.
Boys who are cared for by nannies, Dr. Dennis Friedmans says, are at a greater risk for becoming serial womanizers. Continue reading »
In what appears to be a deliberate attempt to fan the flames of the mommy wars, a psychologist has declared all working mothers to be child abusers.
Jeffery Fine, Ph.D., says that babies need unconditional love and moms who work outside the home can’t possibly provide that. Continue reading »
The good sitters have us over a barrel. You don’t want to pay too little and risk losing the rare chunk of gold that is a responsible sitter with good references who your kids actually love.
But you don’t want to bankrupt yourself just get a date night either. And surveys like the recent “Nanny Survey” out of Park Slope, Brooklyn, don’t make life much easier with statements like “Pay rates vary considerably from family to family, depending on a wide variety of factors, including some not obvious in these statistics (e.g., how demanding the employer is, Nanny’s ability to be flexible with hours, etc).”
So how do you throw all those factors out and just get down to the dollars and cents? Turns out there are just five factors you really need to consider when it comes time to pull out your wallet – or woo a new sitter. Continue reading »
A good sitter is worth her weight in gold – or in my house, chocolate – but they have a lot in common with sexy straight men who aren’t flying the freak flag: they’re all taken.
No wonder some moms are taking the same steps they took to hook a sperm donor to find their new nanny. They’re going speed dating. Continue reading »
Lori Garcia 
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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