I’ve been in the nanny business for 20 years now. For 4 years prior, I was a part and full time nanny, and for about 6 years prior to that I was the neighborhood babysitter. I remember when my Mom came to me and said she had received a phone call from a friend that asked if I could babysit for their daughter. I’m pretty sure my Mom was shocked and surely didn’t see me as ready for that responsibility. And so it began. My launch into being the best babysitter my neighbor had ever seen!
I took on that responsibility like it was a full time job, which is sort of ironic since I have had a career building a successful nanny placement service. I made it my mission to be every families first call and favorite and boy did I succeed. I think I missed out on the whole high school social life thing for the most part, but I didn’t mind.
My daughter Ellie will be 13 in October. I frequently vent to my staff in our Monday team meetings about my parenting skills and how my kids can’t remember anything- forget everything- can’t even remember to brush their teeth- not to mention leaving things everywhere and losing them. With this in mind, my daughter was asked to watch my friend Mollie’s kids this morning. I could see the excitement on my daughters face.
Flashback- I can remember my Mom being completely perplexed when neighbors would tell her how great I was at things like folding laundry and doing dishes. My Mom was like “there’s no way Rebecca has any idea how to do those things and never does them at home”. I remember at the time thinking “Hey, I gotta make money here, Mom; I do the dishes and do them better than anybody else!” You can probably see where this is going.
I suddenly realized that my daughter probably has all the skills needed to impress my friend. She simply doesn’t feel the need to impress me. Low and behold who was up 15 minutes before she needed to walk several doors away to babysit? You got it. Ellie was ready to go and got herself up without even waking the rest of the house (even though we are in Chelan in a small condo). This is the child that I have to wake every morning to get up to go to school and she’s late no matter how early she gets up.
Maybe there’s hope for her future yet! And maybe I will get to retire one day and Ellie will take over the business! We can hope.
