July 2008

Before I started to get ready to go to work the other day, my youngest daughter, age 4, came into my room and wanted to play a quick game of Connect 4. Before we started playing, she looked me directly in the eye and with a very serious expression (which is unusual for this giggle monster), said “Mommy, if I win, you have to have another baby. And, I want a baby brother!”

How did my four-year old learn how to make a bet on the outcome of a game? It certainly isn’t the standard practice in our household.

I hesitated for a moment in my reply, “How about if Ozzie [our 85lb. dog] is your baby brother?” Weak answer, I know. How do you tell your child that your work is essentially one of your babies? I guess when she’s old enough to read, she’ll find this blog archived somewhere and by then, hopefully, she’ll understand.

Fri. July 18 at 3:49pm - Voice Mail on Zoe Foods Answering Service

“…Yesterday on Rte 126 in Bellingham I hit a package that was in the middle of the road. I didn’t spot it right away. It was not an empty box like I thought it was. It was a box of your Zoe’s Energy Bars. Didn’t hurt my car, really. I’m not complaining about it. But it made an awful mess in the road which I had to kind of clean up. Some of the boxes weren’t damaged. I was going to give them out to some kids because I don’t think you want them back because the expiration date was July 5th. If you do want them back, let me know. There’s probably about 6 or 10 boxes that weren’t damaged with 12 [bars] each in them. If there is any problem with my giving the remainder of them out to kids let me know. I don’t know what happened, guess they fell off the back of a truck. Well, let me know. Bye.”

This was an unusual customer voice mail to have received! I called the gentleman back and he was lovely. After chatting for a couple of minutes he asked me which stores near him carried Zoe’s Bars because he had eaten the Peanut Butter Paradise Bar and really like it. I told him that I’d be happy to send him a couple of fresh bars for him to try and appreciated his cleaning up the mess in the road.

So how did a case of Zoe’s Bars get into the middle of the road in Bellingham, MA? Beats me – but not Detective Tim who runs Zoe Foods’ operations. Tim reasoned that these bars were being picked up by the brother of someone who works at our Franklin, MA warehouse who was going to use the expired product for livestock feed. Good deduction Detective. Those’ll be some very healthy hogs with all that fiber, protein and omega-3s!

Follow Your Intuition

I continued to interview more nanny candidates. The process had become very tedious. I even looked into hiring a nanny agency but just couldn’t get myself to spend a $3000 fee for a nanny who might only last one year. I received an email from a young woman via sittercity.com. She lived nearby and was looking for a nanny position. I phoned her and she seemed terrific. I invited her to come and meet my family the next day. After 15 minutes, I knew I had found the right nanny – finally! She stayed for a couple of hours to talk with me, my husband, and meet our kids. Yeah!

The search process for a new nanny took four months, three poor hires, and more hours than I care to count. I have come to learn that hiring a nanny, live-in or live-out, is more than just hiring another employee for Zoe Foods. This is the person who takes care of my children all day long. She loves them, has fun with them, and yes, disciplines them as well. She has free run of our home and transports my most precious cargo. She can hold me hostage or set me free.

I’ve come to the conclusion that finding the right nanny is not all that different from knowing when your significant other could also be your partner for life. You just know when you know. It’s common sense, personality, and chemistry rolled up into one. Can you imagine calling your boyfriend’s past girlfriends to do a reference check?

If you’ve read Nanny Nightmares (Chapters 1-8), I’d love to hear what you thought. My mom, my saviour in Nanny Nightmares, just read my blog and said that it was too hard to find all of the entries. She was right! So, if you missed one, you can easily find it now by clicking on the link under “Categories” to your left.

More than a quarter of all Americans are now obese, and that’s about a 2% increase from 2005 to 2007 according to U.S. government figures[1], in Reuters today[2]. And, despite the fact that the majority of foods targeting children are unhealthy (see my last posting), the childhood obesity rate has hit a plateau at 16% of U.S. children.

So, just maybe, the message about the importance of nutrition, diet, exercise – basically a healthy lifestyle – is starting to sink in. If adults cannot make the changes for themselves, maybe they’re at least helping the next generation.

The research also shows that there is a higher incidence of obesity in very specific areas of this country. Namely, 27% of adults in the South are obese, 25% in the Midwest, 23% in the Northeast, and 22% in the West, with only 18.7% in Colorado. I’m not a market researcher but I do know that people in these different areas of the country tend to live different lifestyles which could correlate to the differences in level of the rates of obesity.

It would be interesting to see if my there is anything to my theory. If you live in these different areas, please comment and share your opinion and thoughts!

If you’re interested in knowing what your Body Mass Index (BMI) is, you can look it up on the following government table: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/obesity/bmi_tbl.htm

A new Canadian study suggests that foods targeting children that may appear healthful, but are not, appeared in the Time Magazine article “The Trouble with Healthy Kid Foods” last week.[1] The study excluded obvious junk foods and found that 62% of foods with a positive health claim are actually of “poor nutritional quality”.

The study used the guidelines for children’s diets set forth by the Washington-based nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and adapted from guidelines by the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity.

The article promotes the guidelines set forth by the CSPI, but the writer doesn’t question whether these guidelines are truly sufficient to make educated food choices. The CSPI has over-simplified the process of reading nutrition fact labels. It recommends that children do not consume foods that contain more than 35% of its calories from fat, nor 35% of its total weight in sugar.

Most people look for low fat food and don’t bother to notice how much sugar is in a single serving. I just realized the other day that my favorite Stonyfield low fat vanilla yogurt has 29g of sugar per serving! Although that is only 13% of the total weight of a single serving, it still seems high when a 57g Snickers Bar also has 29g of sugar. Bottom line – our bodies turn sugar into fat.

So should we eat yogurt with a fairly high content of sugar or a whole grain product that has less sugar but higher fat? What the Time Magazine article and the CSPI don’t examine is the quality of the fat. There are good fats (essentially fatty acids), bad fats (saturated fats), and really bad fats (trans fats).

For example, omega-3 fatty acids by definition, are an essential fatty acid. This means that our body cannot survive without them and cannot produce them. The only way for us to get omega-3s is to consume them from food (either fish or plants such as flaxseed, soy, and some nuts and seeds).

I know this makes reading a nutrition facts panel a bit more complicated, but just as important as noting the sugar level, it is also important to consider what types of fat you are consuming, not just how much.

I’m so excited about work. I’ve been trying to build Zoe Foods for 8+ years and we’ve been through some very interesting ups and downs. Zoe’s Granola was once ranked #7 out of all natural granola! With some recent improvements we’re hoping to get right back up there and beyond.Last Thursday, we sent an email newsletter announcing Zoe’s new crunchy-licious and nutritious granola. We told people that we’d send them a box on us if they were interested in signing up for our Consumer Advisory Panel. About 2,000 people opened their email and as of today, about 40,000 people have signed up for our Consumer Advisory Panel!!!

40,000 people! We thought that maybe if we were lucky 5,000 people would sign up. We had hoped our newsletter would get passed around, but had no idea that it would have such a far reach. Thank you to all of you who are interested in Zoe Foods! We’re a small company on a mission to make a difference in your life with foods you can enjoy that are also good for you. We really value your input and are excited to hear your thoughts on our new crunchy granola. Please let us have your comments and feedback so we can continue this fantastic run.

Right now our small, but growing, company is sorting out the huge number of responses. Thank you to all 40,000 of you for your time in signing up for our Consumer Advisory Panel and for your interest in supporting Zoe Foods. We’ll be emailing you soon to describe what it means to be part of our advisory panel.

Babu to The Rescue

My mom actually had a life of her own – how could I have possibly forgotten – tunnel vision had clearly set in. Thank you mom for all of your help then and now. My dad to the rescue for a day! Have you heard that a male nanny is called a “Manny”?

Anyone who knows my father gets a good chuckle when they think of him as the “manny”. While I was growing up, my sisters and I rarely saw him during the week – he was a classic entrepreneur and workaholic. He never changed a diaper, unless you count wrapping a cloth diaper around my waist like a towel, and had never taken care of all three of his girls for an entire day. Times have changed, and at age 71, my dad was changing with them! He wouldn’t be able to check his email every ten minutes, or take every business call that came in. Instead he would have to focus on his granddaughters. And he did! I learned that my older daughter genuinely beat him in a game of Candyland. The day “Daddy” was the “Manny” I received photos of my girls sent from my dad’s cell phone. Not only were they all surviving, but also having fun. The best part about this day was that my dad started to form an independent bond with my girls. In looking back, I have learned that not only would it be great if my dad continued to spend some one-on-one time with his granddaughters, but that my husband and I should also make the same effort on a regular basis. Stay tuned for Chapter 8, the last and final chapter of Nanny Nightmares.

Too Good To Be True

SitterCity.com, 4nannies.com, enanny.com – I was through with trying to recruit someone through the local paper, and posted nanny listings on several nanny websites. I also looked into an au pair but didn’t think that would work given the number of hours we needed. Given my work load, my mom helped me to screen some candidates.

I interviewed several young women in their twenties who wanted to nanny for a couple of years – they sounded promising. Right off the bat I’d ask them how far along they were in the interview process because I didn’t want to waste my time with someone who was just about to accept an offer from another family. I spoke with about 10 different people, and about half of them told me that they were at the beginning of the interview process when they weren’t. After my husband and I spent three hours interviewing one woman over two days, she told me she had just accepted a position with a nearby family but would be happy to do some extra babysitting for my kids.  Yeah, I’ll be sure to call her.

Ugh – don’t these twenty-somethings have better things to do with their time than to waste mine? What happened to honesty and being direct? There’s nothing wrong with going after more than one job at a time, but be honest about where you are in the process.

I spoke with another woman who sounded nice who had worked for the
Tom Clancy – a real writer! She was discreet in the experiences she shared, but they did sound akin to those from a Hollywood nanny. All was moving forward with this prospect until I couldn’t reach her anymore. Turns out she was staying with her family and her sister wasn’t giving her my message because she thought I was a bill collector. Next.

I got back from my business trip from the production run of our new granola and my girls were asleep. From their perspective, I was gone for three “sleeps” – not the two days I had promised. It seems to be tougher on my younger daughter, age 4, when I travel for work. My 5 ½ year old seems to take it in stride and accepts that this is what her mommy has to do.

The next morning (yesterday) I was excited to have my girls eat Zoe’s new crunchy granolas for breakfast. I figured that if two picky eaters liked Zoe’s Granolas, then we’d really have a shot at growing the company after eight hard years of just surviving. My 4-year old was all over it. She tried it, ate it, and went back for seconds and thirds! It was a hit, and a relief for me.

My older daughter was a little tougher on me. She told me that she doesn’t like granola but would try it. How could I have a child who doesn’t like granola when that’s what I spent my working hours thinking about?  Ugh! She tried it anyway, smiled, told me she didn’t like it, and walked away. I couldn’t believe it. Okay, I don’t need everyone to like my company’s products, I’ll settle for 50% (as if my children of two make a statistically significant sample).

A couple of minutes later I heard my youngest daughter screaming, “Mommy, she keeps stealing my granola.” Hmmm, at the young age of 5 my daughter has learned how to push my hot buttons. As long as she likes Zoe’s Granola, she can push that hot button anytime! I think Zoe Foods is finally off to the races, and after  8 years in training, I am really excited. As far as my older daughter goes, I think that my husband and I had better brace ourselves for her teenage years.

No More DWI (Driving While Interviewing)

Still no nanny, but between my mom and working from home a couple of afternoons, I managed. It’s several weeks after I received my moving violation for taking a left on a red rather than sitting in the middle of a busy intersection, and it’s time to appear in municipal court to argue my case. I really thought I’d have a nanny by now. I never dreamed I’d have to pick my girls up from school, give them lunch in the car, and bring them with me to court to appeal my ticket. This really adds some diversity to their after school activities – I know, I am exposing my children to government and law. Yeah, right.

We head for the court room which is filled with decent looking citizens who are waiting for their opportunity to argue their moving violation. I wish I had thought to bring some extra books to keep my girls occupied while sitting in the courtroom, it’s incredibly quiet and every time one of my girls wiggles, it sounds loud. While we are waiting, I jot some notes down on the back of an envelope to organize my thoughts. My girls want a turn with my pen, shhh! After about 30 minutes, my youngest announces that she has to “go potty.” We’ve been working on teaching her to whisper, but all the lessons are lost in the moment. Everyone in the courtroom turns to look our direction (I am the only one with young children). I quietly walk towards the front of the room to give my name to the policeman so that I don’t miss my turn while I take my children to the bathroom.

A couple of minutes after we are reseated, the judge calls my name and I approach the front of the courtroom. I state my case simply and the judge excuses my ticket. He then tells the girls they can bring my paperwork to him, and then he can show them his light-up pen. My older daughter is too shy and stays close to me. My younger daughter brings the judge the papers and he hands her his light-up pen. She is off like a shot thinking that it was a gift. Great, now we’re going to get in trouble for stealing J. My youngest brings the judge his pen back and the courtroom gets a good chuckle. I head out with my girls to go home so they can nap, and I can get some work done. On the way to the car, my older daughter asks me, “Mommy, so what did you do wrong at that red light?” Stay tuned for Chapter 6 of Nanny Nightmares…

I don’t usually blog about my company’s products, but I am excited, really excited. For eight years Zoe Foods has produced granolas with the best nutritional profile out there but has struggled to get Zoe’s Granolas to taste as good as the leading sellers.

I am really excited to say, that the struggle is over and that we’ve finally figured it out. Tim (my operations director) and I are now at our manufacturer’s plant because after three months, we finally figured out how to get our granolas to truly taste excellent, and have an even better nutritional profile. And, the coup de grace, we’ve figured out how to make the granola crunchy while maintaining the integrity of the flaxseed and the omega-3s!

When we tasted the product from the line, I felt like dancing “The Granola Jig” in my lab coat, hairnet, goggles, and earplugs! Quaker Oats – watch out.

Driving While Interviewing

Technology is great – it allows us to multi-task. As a momtrepreneur, I always seem to be trying to do more than one thing at a time. Interviewing nanny candidates is no exception. I saw nothing wrong with trying to get an errand done during lunch and interviewing a potential nanny while I was driving. It was all local driving and I knew my way.

The Newton Center intersection… I was waiting to turn left at a five-way intersection. I was in the middle of interviewing Anne. She seemed pleasant and had excellent nanny experience. I started to ask questions about her responsibilities. The light turned green and I was the fourth car from the light. I explained that there would be no cleaning other than any mess she and the kids might make. There was a lot of traffic… But there would be laundry. All four cars waiting to turn left pulled into the middle of the intersection waiting for a break in traffic. Hmm, you don’t mind doing the laundry. Good. All three cars ahead of me turned left just as the green light turned yellow. I was the last of four cars to turn. Oh, you will not wash our private things. The light of course turns red as I start to turn left. …and you’re not comfortable going into my husband’s and my bedroom. (Aside, what does she think we do or have in there anyway?) I couldn’t back up and didn’t want to sit in the middle of a 5-way intersection, so I move forward – left on a red light – yikes.

Suddenly there’s a siren and a cop pulls me over. Hearing the sirens in the background, I tell Anne I have to go. I practically break into tears – I can’t handle it all – work, kids, nanny, laundry. The policeman told me that the three cars ahead of me deserved a ticket too, but he was only able to pull me over since I was the last in the line. It was my lucky day – a moving violation and another nanny candidate down the tubes, even if she had some hang-ups about dirty laundry. I felt like crying. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have gotten a ticket. Now I’ll have to appeal my ticket in municipal court. My husband will not be happy with me. No more DWI for me (Driving While Interviewing)! Stay tuned for Chapter 5 of Nanny Nightmares.

I was about to write “because of the nature of my work” when I realized that wasn’t even being close to honest. What I really mean is, because of my nature, my work and personal time are intertwined. Yesterday, when my marketing intern, Kim, told me that she wanted to finish some work at home and that she would email it to me when she was done, I asked her to please give me a quick call to let me know that the email was sent. I gave her my home phone number without a second thought.

It’s 8:15pm and the phone at home rings. I am indisposed for several minutes and I ask my five and a half year old to please answer the telephone. She is thrilled to have such an opportunity! She answers the phone and says hello. I tell my daughter to ask who it is and then tell them that I will call them back soon. The next thing I know is that my daughter is telling Kim that I am in the bathroom and cannot come to the phone. Too much information. I can hear Kim trying to get my daughter to repeat the message she wants her to give to me, but I can’t hear what she is saying. My daughter hangs up the phone, “Kim says to emah your blah.”

That would be five year old for “email your blog”. Luckily, the mixing of work and home doesn’t seem to phase her or me. After she goes to bed, I email my blog to Kim.

I just read an article on www.Entrepreneur.com called “The Guilty Mom Entrepreneur”[1] – does that ring a bell? The article explains how working moms feel guilty about working and not being with their kids, and about being with their kids and not working. The article advises us working moms to separate the two and focusing exclusively on each one.

Good advice, but difficult to follow. What do you do when you’re in the car with your family and your cell phone rings and it’s one of your investors, or your sales guy who you’ve been waiting to hear important news from all day? I don’t know about you, but I take the call and tell my family I just need a couple of minutes. When my childrens’ nanny calls me at work, I take the call because she rarely calls and if there’s a problem, I want to know.

Isn’t the advantage of starting your own business to have this flexibility without someone looking over your shoulder and judging you? I started my own business because I believe in meritocracy – not face time.

I think the biggest problem with working moms and their guilt, is that they have let society tell them how they should feel rather than making the choice for themselves. Only I can be responsible for how I feel. If I choose to be an entrepreneur, mom, wife, and friend – then that’s who I am, and I don’t need to feel guilty about trying to squeeze it all in.

As Peggy Lee sang in 1963 “I can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan”. We’ve come along way in the last 45 years, now we just need to leave our guilt at the door.

Week 2 and Strike 1 with Sheila as my girls’ nanny. During her second week of work Sheila told me that one of their cars died and that she would need to use one of our cars for work. Before I could blink, my husband and I were juggling our two cars, our separate commutes to work, and Sheila’s needs in taking care of our children. In retrospect, I can’t believe that we started talking about buying a third car so Sheila could take care of all six kids! Clearly, we had lost perspective.

One evening I mentioned to my husband that I had a funny feeling about Sheila, and that perhaps she was an alcoholic or something. He couldn’t believe that I could say something so horrible when I had no facts to base it on.  He was right, it was just a hunch. But somehow I knew something was not right, I just didn’t know what it was yet.  

Before we knew it, the families were merging. Her kids’ toys were at our house, ours at hers, and she was asking to borrow things like heating pads, and an ipod charger. Although her children were nice, this was becoming more complicated than what I had signed up for.

Then one school day, Sheila didn’t show up for work. I tried to reach her and left messages on her cell and home phones. No answer. I took my girls to school and wondered if I’d need to pick them up at noon. Given the drive time between our home, school, and my office, and since I couldn’t reach Sheila, I decided to work from home. At about 10am my home phone rang. It was Sheila and she sounded horrible – she slurred her words and sounded out of it.  Sheila was surprised that I had picked up the phone. She explained that she had been out with her girlfriends the night before and had eaten a hamburger and had gotten food poisoning. She had gone to the ER last night and had just returned home. I had never heard of staying overnight at the ER from dinner-time till 10am for food poisoning. It seemed odd, but what was I going to say other than I hope you feel better soon, and next time, please have your husband or son call to let us know that you will not be coming to work.  I was suspicious of Sheila’s story, but my husband convinced me to give her the benefit of the doubt since I had yet to find any good live-in nanny prospects.

Sheila continued to push the boundaries. She called in sick again (no hospital this time) and explained that she had a bug. Again, her speech was very slow and her words were slurred. Over the last ten years, I’ve never had an employee call in sick to work and sound this way – something wasn’t right but I still hadn’t found a new nanny.

This time we went from Strike 1 to Strike 3 in one fell sweep. Sheila came to work one morning and was really out of it. Her eyes were at half mast and her words were running together. My girls asked me what was wrong with her. That was it – she was done. My intuition was right and Sheila clearly had some sort of drug or alcohol problem. I did my best to keep my kids away from her and whisked them and our dog out of the house. From the car I called my husband. Someone else had to pick up the girls that afternoon – there was no way I wanted her driving them, not in any car, and not in ours.

My husband called Sheila to see if he could find out what was going on. She claimed to be fine. Balancing work and home got dicey since we both had meetings and deadlines that at the time, we felt couldn’t be missed. My husband called Sheila’s husband to learn more, and he offered to pick up our kids from school and help take care of them for the day. (He was a temporarily unemployed school teacher who we had spent some time with him, so we made an exception). Ugh – what a mess. My husband went home early and let Sheila go. She was very angry and upset. Although she was still out of it and slurring her words, she thought that we were being unfair. It was a sad state of affairs, but we needed to do what was best for our family.

Unfortunately, letting Sheila go wasn’t the end. Several days later we received a call from one of our credit cards to asking us to verify atypical charges. Turns out Sheila used our credit card to pay some of her bills, buy tickets for her family to the circus, and make a couple thousand dollars of other purchases. Since she wouldn’t return our calls, we ended up reporting her to the police at which time we discovered that she had a narcotic problem and a criminal record five feet long!

In retrospect, I realize I should have had the difficult conversation with Sheila as soon as I was unhappy with how she was managing my children with her own. Perhaps I would have ended up letting her go sooner and been stuck with no help again, but I certainly wouldn’t have had to be concerned about my girls’ well-being. Balancing the demands of work and family will always have its challenges, but I’ve learned I need to take care of my family first, or I won’t have the mental capacity for much of anything else.  Stay tuned for Chapter 4 of Nanny Nightmares…

When Will I Ever Learn?

With no nanny, I was in a bind. The first week after the nanny (Danielle) left, my friends with kids, friends without kids, and moms I had just met all pitched in to help care for our girls during the work day. I’d leave work at lunch time to shuttle the girls from one “play date” to another, and my husband would cut out of work a bit early to pick them up. We found a substitute teacher who took care of the girls for a week. The following week, my mom made the 3-hour drive to help out.

Meanwhile, I continued to look for a permanent nanny.  After a failure with Danielle, my confidence in hiring was shaken. I needed someone who could help to fill my shoes while I was at work, who shared our family’s values, and who would genuinely love our kids and not just view being a nanny as a job.

I received several calls from a woman named Sheila who wanted a live-out nanny position. Since there is a significant difference in cost for a “live-in” versus “live-out” nanny, I didn’t follow up with her immediately. I interviewed several other people:

• a dentist from Columbia who wanted to be paid $1000/week and would work for a year while she finished an additional degree (way too pricey, not committed
• a super high energy woman who didn’t stop talking and was too immediately cuddly with my girls, who said it was fine to live with us during the week and go home to her husband an hour away on weekends (too intense, wouldn’t last)
• a young girl finishing her college education who was super quiet, who seemed to be looking for a way to move out of her parents’ house
• a woman with a 14 month old child who she’d bring to work which could be okay but she spent most of the interview chasing her child versus interacting with mine or talking to me.

 After these interviews, I interviewed Sheila who looked pretty good in comparison.

Sheila was married with four kids ages 5 to 11. She told me that all her kids would be in school full-time and busy with activities afterwards. She was ready to go back to work as a nanny and had a car to use on the job. There was a lot about Sheila that seemed great, but I hesitated in hiring her. Sheila’s only reference was from a friend for whom she had babysat regularly because Sheila had been taking care of her own four children. The nature of this reference should have made me pause, but desperation clouded my vision. I told Sheila that she could have the job temporarily while I continued to look for a “live-in” nanny if she was interested. She was eager to begin and told me that she hoped I’d change my mind and hire her permanently. I was open and honest with her but gave her no guarantees.

The kids liked Sheila and she didn’t let them get away with murder. Sheila could cook and my husband was thrilled! At the end of the first week, I came home to find Sheila, my two girls, and two of her children. Hmm, they were all having fun. It did seem a bit odd that she wouldn’t have mentioned that she’d be taking care of her kids as well as my mine. Before I knew it, my girls were on her children’s schedule. Her kids were at our house as frequently as Sheila took care my girls to her own. My girls were missing naps and getting grumpy. Was I paying Sheila to take care of both my kids and her own?

School started and I was able to avoid having the tough discussion of needing more boundaries because Sheila’s children were to be in school all day and staying after for activities. When someone takes care of my children, I find it very difficult to “manage” them because I feel like they can hold me “hostage” since they have my children all day. I couldn’t believe that things were getting so complicated with Sheila and that she had only worked for us for one week! If I had only realized that this was just the beginning… Stay tuned for Chapter 3 of Nanny Nightmares.

Enjoy your long weekend and look for Chapter 2 of Nanny Nightmares on Monday. The only thing I’m going to tell you about my next blog is that it is the second chapter of seven through which I will cover drug addicts and lost twenty-somethings.

I’m going away tomorrow afternoon for our annual family gathering for the 4^th of July holiday. Under one roof, we will have seven children ages 2-7, and nine children ages 37 through 72. I can’t wait for the ruckus to begin J.

Have a wonderful 4^th of July and remember that although our country is far from perfect, we have freedoms that many others around the world cannot even begin to imagine.

We had wonderful nannies for our girls over the last 5+ years. Three nannies in 5 years and one who stayed with us for three – not a bad batting average. And why not? I ran my own business and had plenty of experience in hiring people over the last eight years.

August 2007 – nanny nightmares begin. 10 different people over three months. My confidence in my ability to hire was shattered. Not only did our nanny troubles stress out my whole family, it was an omnipresent distraction. These three months seem vaguely humorous when looking back, but still beg the question as to whether or not I had my priorities straight, as you will see in the ensuing chapters.

Chapter 1: Danielle

Our first hire last August was Danielle. She wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but seemed nice enough. Her references were only okay. But my husband and I logically discussed the pros and cons of Danielle versus other candidates, and realizing that we were desperate, Danielle got the job.

My first mistake – I didn’t listen to my gut and hired Danielle anyway. What I learned over the next two weeks is that she was a push-over and lacked good judgment. She drove around with my youngest daughter improperly buckled into her car seat for several days. Of the 3-point buckle, only the plastic piece across her chest was closed. How did I learn about this? My children told me! When I told Danielle what the girls said and asked her about the seatbelt, she denied it. Later that evening, I decided to see for myself. I put my youngest in her car seat to discover that only the plastic top buckle would close. The strap had been pulled so tight that the buckle portion, which is the true anchor, would not close. I fixed the seat belt and took note of Danielle’s lie and lack of good judgment. Strike1.

My oldest daughter came home from the local lake/beach one day wearing platform flip-flops about 4 sizes too big for her. Danielle explained that she had gone out of the house without shoes and so they had taken these from the lost & found. How do you not notice a child leaving the house for the day barefoot? How can it be right to take something that is not yours? Still desperate with no other nanny prospects, I kept Danielle on but started looking again in earnest. Strike 2.

My girls’ behavior was getting brattier by the day. Clearly they had no boundaries and were calling the shots with Danielle. I learned that Danielle had given the girls peanut butter and mint jelly for lunch. (Mint jelly… isn’t that only used in recipes? What kind of lunch is that?) I casually asked Danielle not to give them mint jelly again while we were preparing dinner – she replied that the girls had asked for it so she figured it was okay. So, if they ask for chocolate ice cream for lunch tomorrow, would that be okay? Strike 3. Since when do three and four-year old kids know what’s best for them? Stay tuned for Chapter 2 of Nanny Nightmares…