Sigh...

The new nanny put in notice today. She has decided to go back to school. In Virginia.

We've only had her for 5 weeks. I knew she was over-qualified when I hired her, but I hoped that she would last longer than this. We talked about her having one year of college left, but I guess I wrongly assumed that she would attend school here. You could definitely work a college schedule around my girls' after-school schedule.

Ugh. I lost an entire weekend to interviewing nannies the last time around, and am not looking forward to a repeat. Plus my girls have already become attached to new nanny, and a little stability would be nice.

One of the biggest challenges of being a working mom is finding quality child care. My mom left us with whatever in-home care provider she could find at a bargain--and we had some of the worst babysitters on the planet over the years. There was the one who made a boy drink his own pee because he wet the bed; the one who burned her grass and stomped it out with her house slippers; the one who allowed her 5th grader to smoke; the 16 year old runaway who lived on our couch until she disappeared one day, taking all of the cash in my piggy bank; the crazy holy roller who told us graphic crucifixion stories and took us to church were people were speaking in tongues and turning cartwheels in the aisles, and who yelled at us for wearing shorts because God didn't approve (then God shouldn't have given us triple-digit summers) and who took us to the free summer lunch program in the parks and then took all of the leftovers to feed us the rest of the week, and who crammed about 5 kids into the back of a Volkswagen Rabbit, and who had a pet guinea pig who was allowed to run all over the house, leaving a trial of guinea pig pellets. Makes the one who just plopped us in front of the soaps all summer not seem so bad.

So, my very bad childhood experience makes child care a very high priority for me. And so far we've been lucky in that every nanny seems to have genuinely cared about my children. But I don't like the turnover of the last couple of months, and it's hard on the kids.

The tiny ray of hope is that the #2 choice from my interviews is still interested in the position. Hopefully it will work out, but when I interviewed her she had another job that I was concerned would conflict, so we'll see.