Dawn Brady is a fun-loving mother of three boys and blogger in Boulder, Colorado. This is her story of life before she discovered Sitter.
For the past few years my husband and I have had the most amazing baby sitter in the world, really the absolute best! However, it must be true that all good things come to an end, she now has a “grown up” job. Babysitters – they grow up so fast….
After forgoing date night for a few months and forgetting that it’s possible to go out to eat and not cut up someone else’s food, I admitted to myself it was time to start the agonizing baby sitter search. Those of you with kids know that this is no easy task. Lets just say it could be easier to do just about anything else- fly to the moon in a handmade flying saucer, negotiate world peace, get three children to sleep at a reasonable time, climb Mt Everest etc… really any of those could be easier than finding a new baby sitter. Yet no matter how daunting the task was I knew that if I ever wanted to have a date with my husband again I needed to start the baby sitter search.
Pretending that I was totally hip and tech savvy, I turned to the Internet and all the usual suspects: Craigs List, Care.com Sittercity.com I placed an ad and the responses started rolling in. I thought wow, I rock at this, why did I wait so long, there are so many kind, responsible, experience people (at least according to their bio they were giving me) all wanting to watch my boys one night a week so my husband and I could get out and actually talk to each other! Still pretending to be hip and tech savvy I thought the next logical step in the process would be to start googling the names of the people who have responded…. and that is where it all started to go downhill……
Without going into too many details, let’s just say that one applicant, who I was totally impressed with based on her profile, was recently interviewed by a local paper for her involvement in dumpster diving for most of her food, and another few applicants work at pot shops on the hill (University area of town) – neither one of these pastimes scream Mary Poppins to me. And, regardless of what we have done in our past, we all want nothing but purity in our babysitters.
That is how my baby sitter search had been going until about 11:30 today when I dropped my middle son off for a play date. I was telling my friend about my baby sitter search, and she told me about the most amazing app EVER – its called Sitter and its totally free!!! Build your profile and connect and share sitters with your friends. With a quick text message your baby sitting request can be sent out to multiple potential sitters at once! No need for awkward “blind dates” at the coffee shop meeting potential new sitters- all the sitters that you connect with on the Sitter app have already been used by your friends! AWESOME – let date night begin!
