<p>I worked full-time, intensely, and with a very long commute when my children were young and I depended heavily on the fact that my husband worked locally and on my live-in nanny. I was blessed several times through the years with some wonderful women who took terrific care of my kids. And then there were the others . . . </p>
<p>I didn’t want to hire Regina in the first place because she was extremely heavy and unkempt. My former nanny (with whom we were on very good terms) accused me of being a “fattist” so I felt guilty and hired her. She seemed OK during the two interviews I had with her. She was not.</p>
<p>First clue: She gets in the car with my four-year-old and doesn’t fasten her seatbelt. (In retrospect, it probably didn’t fit her.) S2 says to her, “Regina, you forgot to fasten your seatbelt.” Regina snaps, “Mind your own business!”</p>
<p>Second clue: S1 opens the fridge and reaches for the last Coke can. Regina snaps, “[Name of boy], that’s mine!” Boy thinks: “Yeah, but my family bought it.”</p>
<p>Third clue: Two weeks into her tenure with us, Regina’s grandmother dies. Yeah, right. She needs the following Thursday and Friday off. </p>
<p>Fourth clue: Regina made brownies with the boys. Boys each have one and go off and play. Boys come back and want another brownie. Regina says they’re all gone. Boys report to me that either she ate them all herself or she was planning to eat them all herself. Either way – good grief!!</p>
<p>But the coup de grace was when we finally fired her. I had my DH do the deed because I was long gone for work when the rest of the household woke up. Regina had been with us for six weeks by then and it was just not going to work out. After DH told her, she refused to move out. She said we had guaranteed her housing for a year, and she wasn’t going to move! </p>
<p>DH had to contact our lawyer to deal with her lawyer to make a mutually agreeable arrangement. We finally paid her three weeks pay to get her to leave. The most amazing thing: She stole the laundry detergent from the laundry room before she left!!</p>
<p>“I didn’t want to hire her in the first place…” Good lesson on trusting those gut instincts! I’m hoping that I never get guilted into hiring someone–especially someone living in my house!
Did you have a contract that actually guaranteed housing for a year or was she making things up?
I was blessed with a great sister and neighbor kids (with nearby moms) for babysitting services. thank goodness!</p>
<p>gouf, she was making things up. Before we hired her, we asked if she intended to stay at least a year. (People can lie about it, but I figured it was worth a try to indicate our desire.) That’s how she decided we had guaranteed her room for a year!!</p>
<p>And I do pay attention to my gut now. Live and learn. The older I get, the wiser I get.</p>
<p>not wanting to hire someone just because they’re fat is a horrible thing to do. if you’d seen signs of how rude she was, i’d completely agree with you, but you couldn’t have known she was a bad person just from her figure.</p>
<p>We had an “elder nanny” for a few hours/day when my mother-in-law was living with us. The lady stole one of our credit cards and, among other things, used it to buy $25 gift certificates to give my kids for Hannukah. We thought that was overly generous until we contacted the store and found out it was purchased with our credit card.(she was not an Ivy grad ). She also used my MIL’s card to buy a few things for herself when they were shopping together. My MIL didn’t want to press charges, but we certainly let the agency know what happened!</p>
<p>I once went to make my bi-monthly dry cleaning run and noticed that there were clothes in the pile that I had definitely not worn. Our babysitter at the time noticed my confusion and said “oh I did borrow some of your clothes, I hope you don’t mind”.</p>
<p>We hired a nanny, Nancy seemed like a sweet young girl, and her BF was a very nice young man, or so we thought. Over a few months, we got them “free” housing in a neighbor’s guest cottage with the understanding they would do the yard work. It was a 2nd home for the neighbor.</p>
<p>I made work for the BF in my business, all sorts of odd jobs, then one of my suppliers saw what a hard worker BF was a hired him. The supplier contacted me and we set up a sting and caught him stealing, from both of us. Then I went to the house of the neighbor, every bit of grocery or toiletry item had been stocked from my house (it was all Costco stuff and Costco then was 2+ hours away from our small town) and there was a grocery bag full of mail from my mailbox, mail I had never seen. That mail included bills from my gasoline credit card, they had filled my car with gas & driven all over the place and stole the bills to hide it.</p>
<p>What a mess. I was especially upset about the neighbor sharing their home in good faith, of course the yard work had never been done. I think ‘Nancy’ was sweet and young and easily influence and “John” was a scumbag. That was my first experience with a pathological liar. He looked straight in my eyes with his big baby blues and bald faced lied to me in the sting operation. </p>
<p>I later found out he had stolen $10k in case from his prior job when he had access to the safe.</p>
<p>Yuck. And I left my kids with these two! Well, her, but I just know he was around. That was our last nanny.</p>
<p>It’s been a long time since we’ve dealt with sitters, but one story sticks in my mind…</p>
<p>We hired a high school senior to babysit our kids. She’s the oldest of 4 kids so I assumed (ha ha), that she’d have some caretaking/domestic experience. </p>
<p>When she arrived, I told her that dinner (chix, rice, veggies) was being kept warm in the microwave. When we came home SEVERAL HOURS LATER she told me that she put the leftovers back in the microwave. What? She didn’t have the good sense to put them in the fridge?</p>
<p>I had the same babysitter for seven years then seven in seven months. That’s when I quit work and decided to have my own business.</p>
<p>I can’t even remember all the stories. One a friend of mine called me up and told me how crazy she was (that was one I probably should have listened to my gut on), one stole taxi money for picking up the kid from school, one had a stroke over the weekend and died (thank heavens she didn’t die on the job), one was lovely but got a job at a nursery school, the others I think just flaked out and quit for no apparent reason.</p>
<p>I’m so glad those years are behind me. We used an agency when we moved to a new town; we had a 60 day trial period. On day 61, she said she was pregnant and would be scaling back her hours (!). This is when my daughter was 3 and my son was 3 months old. The agency got us a replacement; she was kind of sour, but ok. Then she brought her daughter over from Jamaica and brought her to work with her (without asking). All it took for my daughter to hurt herself in the park when the sitter was playing with her own daughter for me to realize that this wasn’t working.</p>
<p>I found someone through word of mouth and she stayed with us until we didn’t need a sitter anymore.</p>
<p>We’ve had some wonderful babysitters. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to go to work. That being said, there are some strange ones out there. This story was of my friend’s new nanny. </p>
<p>My friend just hired this sitter. She was young and fairly attractive. One day she forgot to do something my friend asked her to do, so my friend pointed it out to her. The sitter apologized, then asked, “What would you for punishment if I were to forget again.” My friend thought it was a strange question, she said, “Just try harder, but we don’t punish people.” The sitter continued to press, “I am ok to get punished if I do something wrong. The people I used to work for would punish me whenever I did something wrong.” My friend was creeped out, so she let this sitter go.</p>
<p>I was fortunate enough to never need a nanny but I have a friend who went through 11 nannies in the years when her 4 kids were small. One day her H came home from a business trip early and found the nanny and her boyfriend in my friend’s bed! Not even in her own bed! The next one was selling drugs out of the house with her scumbag boyfriend. Another forgot to pick up one of her kids at school one day. I can’t even remember all the horror stories.</p>
<p>The one who my friend thought was great wasn’t actually so great. Those of us who were around would see this woman taking the kids out for a walk, all walking, down a reasonably busy street, with the toddlers running along behind her with her not keeping an eye on them. (I still see this today with nannies in the neighborhood, only not only are they not watching, they’re texting on their cellphones.) She also would take the kids to the park and sit with her nanny friends chatting while the kids ran wild and unsupervised by her. I and another friend mentioned this to the mom and she didn’t want to believe it, until one of her kids fell off a play structure in the park and a mom who was there called 911 on her cellphone because the nanny was nowhere to be found! That was the end of that nanny.</p>
<p>When my son was 7, I had a male college student pick him up from school a few days a week. One day they decided to have an “adventure” and went off exploring. They found a “park” and went walking around in the woods, apparently ignoring numerous signs. Suddenly they were surrounded by security with guns drawn. They had chosen the campus of Homeland Security for their hike. </p>
<p>After he left, my son told me that they’d frequently walk to 7-Eleven where the babysitter would buy him any candy he wanted, and then to the babysitter’s group house, where S would play and eat candy in the backyard while boyfriend “visited” with his girlfriend.</p>
<p>A friend of mine had an adult baby-sitter (neighbor) who was watching her 2 pre-schoolers. One morning, she got a call at work from another neighbor to come home immediately. The babysitter was dead drunk in her bathroom and the kids were unattended. Luckily the kids were fine.</p>
<p>For a short while I lived in same apartment building with a relative. I saw their nanny dangling their very young child over the balcony and told them. They were not pleased with
Me or the nanny.</p>
<p>It’s very tough finding a great nanny, which is one of the reasons I am glad I was able to stay home with my kids until they were in middle school. I had offered to watch relative’s kids but it didn’t work out, which in retrospect was a blessing all the way around.</p>
<p>Well, there was the nanny, actually a dedicated and skilled caregiver, who concealed a pregnancy (or was in denial about it) from the time she was hired until she almost gave birth in our bathroom. Fun times. I have quite a few stories, from the horrifying to the hilarious, but I’m happy to have them far behind me and not revisit those days if I don’t have to. Fortunately the bad eggs were few and our long-term caregivers were wonderful additions to our kids’ lives.</p>
<p>Then there was the one who I hired about a week before a week-long school vacation. When I interviewed her, she was nice, polite, and said all the right things. Right before she started, she called me to let me know that during the interview she had hidden something – she had a pierced eyebrow and wore a hoop in it. OK, I said. There are worse things.</p>
<p>My four-year-old stared at her, tilted his head, and asked, “Mommy, why does [what’s her name] have an earring in her eyebrow?” I had no answer.</p>
<p>The worst thing with this one, however, was that she told me at 7:00 PM one night – right before the week-long vacation! – that she was quitting, after a whopping week or so with us.</p>
<p>So for emergency care we wound up with DH’s baby brother, a sort of “Uncle Buck.” (Remember the movie?) The scary part was when I asked DH if he thought the kids were safe with Uncle Buck. His comment: “Well, if S2 were choking, Buck would probably call me first, to ask if he should call 911.”</p>
<p>We got someone new as quickly as possible. Uncle Buck was truly a stopgap!!</p>
<p>I had nannies for several summers since I worked 7 days a week. Our situation was sort of unique in that we had nannies even when I had teenage daughters ( since they also worked for the family business )
I had a young woman when my youngest was four that was a loser…We didn’t find out until after she was gone that she slept on the sofa and plunked our daughter in front of the TV all morning…since I was done working at noon, she basically neglected our daughter…same nanny also blew the engine in our minivan because she drove it while it was overheating</p>
<p>The next year, I thought I found a good match for our family. She had a lot in common with our oldest daughter and had family in our area. Her references were excellent. I was just about to hire her when she contacted me with a very bizarre story about the disappearance of her friend. It was really off the wall , involving falling off of a cliff and possible murder. Really she could have just told me that she wasn’t interested in the job…but the silver lining was that we found our all time favorite nanny right after that who spent three summers with us. We are still very close and when she had her first child, she asked us if she could name her after our daughter ! She was the best …</p>
<p>Later the weirdo girl accidentally sent us an email that was clearly not meant to be read by us or the other people who received it…what a whacko ! In it we learned that she had a cocaine habit and was having an affair with a man old enough to be her father !</p>
<p>I’ve gone through quite a few nannies over the years, too, but nothing quite as horrifying as some of you. I hired an 8th grader to watch my then 5th grader, 3rd grader, and kindergartner. When I returned home, my third grader announced that the babysitter kept trying to kiss her big brother. I guess 3 years isn’t enough of an age gap, especially when the babysitter is immature. One used to take my kids to run errands. That was o.k. until she lost one of them in a store, so I told her “no more errands”. She filed for unemployment, but I fought it and she lost. She missed a lot of days, so I was happy she quit. Being late and missing days were common with almost all my nannies. The last straw, my last nanny, was from the south and insisted that babies drink sugar water. I told her I didn’t want her to put sugar in the water. A week later I noticed sugar all over the counter. That was her last day. Two of the best ones were an older woman from Mexico who didn’t speak any English. My son was an infant so it didn’t matter. My best nanny was from an Indian Reservation in South Dakota. At her interview, she told me she graduated from the Beverly Hills School for Nannies, but that it was no longer in business. Yeah, right!? I liked her so decided to contact her high school on the reservation. Sure enough, they had had a program with the Beverly Hills School for Nannies and she had gone through it.</p>
). She also used my MIL’s card to buy a few things for herself when they were shopping together. My MIL didn’t want to press charges, but we certainly let the agency know what happened!</p>