Even though we have many friends in the area, most of their children are now in college and have not required a babysitter in years.
I know this, because in many cases *I* was their babysitter ten or fifteen years ago.
After a month or so, I found a sitter from our local University who was smart and hard-working.
She had outstanding references from several mothers and her old youth group leader, in addition to excellent grades and a warm, loving family of origin with several younger siblings.
Our kids took to this new babysitter right away and we appreciated how responsible and kind she was, it really made going out for the evening feel like a "date" since I didn't have to worry about whether or not my sons and daughter were ok.
Unfortunately for us, the academic year came to a close all too soon - and our babysitter returned home to a different part of California for the Summer.
One month has passed since that time, and it has been a long, Long, LONG month. School let out for the Summer at our house too... so I actually have less of a break and more stress than before, with fewer respites.
Then last week I received an urgent message from the woman who oversees my work at my husband's company, letting me know that she needs me to write 9 articles in the next 2 weeks.
Without kids at home, this would be completely possible. With all three kids at home, it's more laughable.
Still, my husband needed me. Or rather, his company needed me. Time to step up and meet the challenge!
I suddenly had the brainstorm to contact our babysitter and ask if she could recommend a college friend that might be interested in babysitting until she returned in a few months. After all she is such a smart, outstanding young woman, her friends are surely great too.
To my delight, our sitter replied immediately. Yes, she had a friend that she trusted. Yes, her friend was interested in the job.
Moments later, I received an email from her friend. She was excited about the job! She was willing to meet up first, provide references, get a background check - whatever I needed. She was up for the challenge.
Thrilled, I hit reply.
"Normally I would say yes to all of the above and check your references very carefully," I wrote. "But since you are a close friend of Sonya* our babysitter, and since we have such a high opinion of her and trust her opinion, why don't you just come over on Monday afternoon and we can give it a trial run?"
After all, I reasoned, I would be in the house all afternoon writing content for my husband and thus able to hear my children and know if they needed me for anything. It seemed like a perfect scenario.
* * * * * * *
Fast forward.
Monday night, around 8pm. Our new babysitter just left.
Overall, I really liked her! She seemed to have a good sense of humor and also a nice rapport with my kids. There were a couple of question marks - like the fact that she didn't start cooking dinner for them until I asked her to; also didn't attempt to bathe them or put them to bed.
Still I felt happy and lucky that she and the kids hit it off and that she seemed to have natural child management skills. I'd already asked her to come back again for date night on Thursday, her first time alone with the kiddos.
The only thing that threw me off, just a little, was her spontaneous confession at the end of her time with us that a person she was close to had just died ~ a manager at her part-time job. She was clearly distraught and confided that she had been very depressed, adding that the "reason" she wanted to babysit was to take her mind off of her sorrow.
She then showed me a tattoo she had gotten in honor of her departed friend, and mentioned that she hoped tattoos would not be a problem for me.
"Of course not," I laughed - "My husband was in a rock band before we had kids. We used to have lives..." I added, "before we had (little) lives. Tattoos are fine."
Yet once she left our home, I felt a creeping discomfort with the scenario and how she had described it. "Why am I so uncomfortable?" I wondered. "It isn't her fault that her friend died young. I wonder what happened to him?"
The weird feeling remained in my gut though, so I decided to do a google search to see if I could find any more information. There was just something about the way in which she talked about how depressed she'd been recently - which made me feel a little weird about leaving her alone with my children.
Google.Com has been my true friend in a host of important life situations, and I have to say, it came through for me today as well.
I did not find anything about her friend's untimely death - but I did find her personal Twitter feed.
"Oh, this is perfect," I thought. "I'll get a chance to see what she is like in her own life, away from work." Without reservation (after all, I was entrusting this woman with my three most precious treasures!) I clicked on her public feed.
Imagine my disbelief when I read her most recent Tweet:
"Ahhh TV is wonderful haha. Too bad they're only allowed 1.5 hrs of tv a day!" ...along with A PICTURE she'd taken of my children watching television while she was supposed to be babysitting them.
Seriously? Are you kidding me?
There were so many things wrong with this scenario - I didn't even know where to start.
- First, it is totally unprofessional to be texting or tweeting while babysitting children who are still awake and sitting right next to you.
- Next, it is unacceptable and potentially illegal to photograph my children and put their images on the internet without my permission.
- Finally, are you f(*ing kidding me? She's tweeting about them not being allowed to watch enough TV? Did she really expect me to pay her $$$ for watching them sit in front of our television for hours on end?
But that wasn't all.
There were three more tweets about my children, including one that read: "Note to self: don't have more than 2 kids!"
Um... you're fired.
* * * * * * * *
I got in touch with her immediately and explained briefly and candidly why I was firing her. I included a link to her "twitpic" of my children. I asked her not to have any further contact with my children, and CC:ed our original babysitter on my message.
"What if Sonya doesn't want to work for us anymore, now that you are firing her friend?" my husband asked.
"Sonya is a smart, caring person who will understand how unprofessional this behavior was," I replied. "But if she doesn't want to work for us because I fired her friend for doing something like this then she isn't the right sitter for our family. I'll just find someone else."
Within 30 minutes I had received a response from the now-fired friend. To paraphrase, she:
-Was sorry
-Didn't mean her tweets in a bad way
-Could understand how I would read them and take offense
-Saw this as a wake up call about how she uses the internet and posts things online
-Had already taken down the tweets and photo
She also thanked me for giving her the opportunity to watch the kids.
* * * * * * * *
I appreciated her email, but I'm not going to reply. It changes nothing.
There are some lessons we have to learn the hard way. Today I learned the hard way that technology has changed what it means to invite a person into your life or family, even for just one afternoon.
When I was a small child, cell phones did not exist and any babysitter that wanted to take my photo and share it with friends would have had to (a)bring a camera, (b)pay $$ to get film developed, and also pay for stamps to (c)mail the photos to their friends in envelopes.
By the time I was 20 years old and babysitting other people's kids as a side-job, cell phones did exist but friendster, myspace, Facebook and all the rest did NOT exist. Twitter had not yet been invented and my friends would have thought it very odd for me to take a photo on my cell phone of children I was babysitting and then send it to them in a text message.
Today, I learned first hand that a perfect stranger can take a pristinely clear photograph of my children with a telephone the size of a credit card and upload the image within moments to a feed that can be viewed by hundreds if not thousands of people instantly.
I guess I've just gotten my first taste of how challenging it will be to shepherd these three precious beings through their childhood in a age of wireless Internet, easy access, over-exposure and cyber-bullying. Wow.
By the same token, today our babysitter learned the hard way that when you make bad choices on the job that jeopardize the privacy of children, you get fired. Instantly.
Hopefully this lesson will stay with her in years to come and help her to monitor her "private" social networking activities more carefully so that she doesn't lose out on the job of her dreams down the road thanks to ill-advised photos or crude language spread all over her personal pages. HR departments DO check that kind of stuff. So do families who hire you to watch their kids.
From here forward, our paths will separate and in my heart I do wish her well.
It's interesting though that we met for only one day and yet in that brief time had such an immediate, important and lasting impact upon each other's lives and perspectives.
I'm sure the Law of Attraction would have a lot to say about that!
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