nanny diary

doing some blog housekeeping. this is an OLD POST FROM JULY that i never finished since i went back to work right after.

now that we have officially joined the ranks of the middle class by being upwardly mobile, swapping refugee blue collars for white collars, and buying a house with an mortgage which is about 50% of our income and operating on consumer debt, we are further entrenching ourselves in middle class culture by looking for a nanny since we can't afford for me to forgo a salary to stay home with the baby. not that i'm sure that's what i would want to do anyways. (side rant: people are wierd about claiming class especially amongst the socially conscious spectrum of born-into-the-middle-class who tend to idealize/glamourize poverty. call a spade a spade. me & grew up on welfare & food stamps and we don't aspire to go back to poverty. i'm just L from the block, i used to have a little and now i have a little more. i have two college degrees, a socially responsible invested retirement fund, and life insurance; i have some privilege. it's not entitlement nor is it bootstraps nor is it a silver spoon. it is however cultural and social capital that i choose to be honest & forthright about. so if you have someone who is not blood-related that takes care of your child for 20+ hours a week every week, she is not a "babysitter" nor a "caretaker" nor a "childcare provider", she is your nanny. you are an employer. you might not be The Man, but you are a Boss. deal with it.)

with our idealism and our roots and our small budget, we decided to hire a vinamese nanny. we placed an ad in the local weekly at the beginning of june to run for 4 weeks. our ideal was to have the nanny start the first week of july on trial since i was going back the second week of july at parttime. we had decided that having the nanny at our house was best since we have cloth diapers and all the gear here already.

we've interviewed around a dozen give or take. i have concluded that vinamese people are insane. okay, not insane, just not... acculturated to professional jobseeking protocol. the number one assumption being "One looks for a job if one is able to work."

the first nanny we hired co Huyen had 20 years of experience and had just retired after caring for a set of american twin girls for a pair of Berkeley doctors for 8 years. after a year of missing them and being bored, she decided to work for a vinamese family for a much lower payscale. after i expressed my desire to hire her, she regretfully informed us that her other employer (of the twins) whose 3rd baby she watched 1-2 days a week wouldn't let her quit and offered her an additional day instead. being emotionally tied to the twin girls, she couldn't quit.

so we went with our second choice, co Thu. she had 8 years experience and had a minor hand disability but we worked out an arrangement of how to compensate for that since VL almost exclusively uses the potty to poo. after coming over to her house a few blocks away from us, she regretfully informed us that her younger brother didn't want her to work because she was disabled and he provided for her so that she wouldnt have to work.

out of frustration i hired nanny #3 di 3 (her birth order name) or di Helen. she was in her 60s, a source of some concern for us since our girl is thick, but this is the friday before our trial week. she started on the 1st. being older and from an older model of childcare, she was responsive to the baby's cries, but wasn't interested in playing with her so much, much less let her stick her toys in her mouth and she refused to go on walks with the baby; it was either too cold or too sunny. granted van lang wasn't taking the expressed breastmilk in the bottle and so therefore wasn't napping very long due to hunger, and i have been known to get bored playing with baby, but by day 2, when she thought i wasn't looking, di ba would read the newspaper while VL lay somewhat disgruntled on the couch next to her. and when i pointed out that VL was making irritable and frustrated sounds, the nany told me she was training her to not need to be held (or presumably played with). trung and i deliberated over whether to let her go. and decided to give her one more day. on day 3, di 3 shows up and announces that she is moving to antioch the next day (july 4th) and is quitting. whatever.

so we have placed another ad in the vinamese paper. we've gotten some calls and i was most interested in a call from what turns out to be my next door neighbor co Thanh a women in her early-40s. she used to own a HK-style dim sum restaurant and it went under so now she stays home watching her grandson. she thought she'd try earning some extra income. she came over and was very sweet with the baby and wanted to work from her house since she still is watching her grandson. i made an appointment to come over and see her house. weo, as it turns out, her son, the baby's thuggish father who is playing world of warcraft in the middle of the workday, doesn't want her to do childcare for another baby because she wouldn't be able to be mobile and get out of the house if need be. so she regretfully turned down the job (which i didnt offer to her yet).

postscript: after all those false starts, we found a great nanny!