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Strollerderby
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 »
How much are you willing to fork over?
My husband likes to joke that he has very reasonable standards for babysitting: those who take care of our son should be highly-qualified, experienced, preferably holding a medical degree or a Ph.D in child development (we’re not picky), yet for some inexplicable reason, not be otherwise employed.
Especially for those of us who don’t live close to family, hiring a babysitter is a fact of life. But in Los Angeles, as in many other cities, having a sitter is basically like taking the cost of your night out — dinner, drinks, movies — and doubling it. And it’s painful to hand over so much cash to someone who could quite possibly have spent the last 4 hours updating her Facebook status from your couch.
An article in the Los Angeles Times asks the question: Are babysitting prices getting outrageous? I’d say they are, but sometimes you have to get crafty. Continue reading »
Remember the Babysitter's Club?
Remember the Babysitter’s Club? Those perky girls who pooled their collective powers of organization, good manners and 7th grade social skills into a thriving business watching younger kids?
I was obsessed with the Babysitter’s Club as a kid. So obsessed that I still have the signed book my 4th grade teacher brought back for me from a writer’s conference, with Ann M. Martin’s scrawl inside the front cover.
So of course I was thrilled to find this scrappy bit of fanfic revealing what happened to the girls of the Babysitter’s Club in the years since they graduated middle school.
In case you missed the gazillion and one ads for large screen TVs these past few weeks, word has it there’s big doings Sunday night on TV. And if the first thought that came into your mind was Puppy Bowl than stop reading now.
Because Puppy Bowl is an obvious one for keeping the kids IN the room. The Super Bowl, well, that seems to vary by family.
Babysitter finders Sitter City say you NEED to find a sitter this weekend, and although we’re pretty well aware of what’s in it for them, we were intrigued by their reasoning: Continue reading »
When a mom comes home to find a big pile of poop in her kid’s potty, the first thought might be “yay, she finally used the toilet!” But can you blame the parent who thinks just as quickly: why is this still in here?
Kelcey Kintner of the Mama Bird Diaries pondered this week whether it’s the sitter’s job to dump the kid’s potty. A quick poll of my Strollerderby colleagues came up with a unanimous: 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 
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