The Nanny Diaries

Monday, November 22nd, 9am

Dear Diary,

I've been feeling ambivalent about our nanny lately.

On the plus side, she always shows up early. Like, sometimes really early, like thirty minutes early. Better early than late, right? Besides, I've reminded her several times that while arriving early to beat traffic is totally fine, I can only afford to have her on the clock for five hours -- so if she arrives at 7:30 instead of 8, she'll only be paid through 12:30 instead of 1. And she always says that's fine.

She's really nice like that.

Also, Sadie likes her a lot. She's patient and has no issue dealing with Sadie's frequent freak-outs and meltdowns. That goes a long way. And she tolerates the dogs.

On the minus side...well, there's the food issue, of course. The simple fact is that she eats a lot of our food. She worked her way through an entire jar of peanut butter in a week. And there was PralineGate, the episode in which she broke into of a box of pralines my Dad had brought me back special from a business trip to New Orleans. I was secretly pissed about that, Diary. But when you think about it, wasn't that really my fault? I never specifically told her there were foods she shouldn't eat. She's watching my child for five hours a day; she's entitled to the contents of my refrigerator. Right?

And...well, there's other little things that bug me, to be honest. Like the day I let her sift through three bins of clothes I was planning on donating to Goodwill, and offered to let her take something if she liked it. When I returned home, she'd cleared out everything but half of a bin. I mean...it was fine, I'd told her she could. But still, it seemed a little odd that she'd take everything. (And remark, five minutes later, that she really liked some of my shoes.)

I guess when you get right down to it, the truth is that there are some things about her that don't sit right with me. Like all the times when I've come home at 1pm -- the baby is never napping. This makes no sense. Lunchtime is at 11:30. Naptime is at noon, and typically runs 90 minutes. The baby is always awake when I get home, yet the nanny claims she took a nice long nap each time. How is this possible? She never has a good answer for me, but I feel bad grilling her over small details.

Besides, she folds my laundry for me and unloads the dishwasher. I don't really want to mess with a good thing.

Nevertheless...I feel like maybe it's not working out with her. I've given this a good two-month run, and I think that for the money we're paying her, we could find someone better. I'll feel bad about it, because she's so nice and she means well...but it's my daughter we're talking about here.

Monday, November 22nd, 1:30pm

It all started with a phone call.

"I'm thinking of replacing [Nanny]," I told Scott.

"Okay. Why?"

"I don't know...just a feeling I get. I'd like to hire [our current babysitter] instead; we vibe better and I find her more trustworthy and capable in general."

"Fine with me. Talk to Owner [of the nanny placement agency] and let her know. Oh -- and while you're at it, you should take a look at the invoices they've been sending us recently. They seem...high."

I should stop to explain here. The nanny's job is to report the hours she works to the owner of the nanny placement agency. She, in turn, bills us at the end of each week for the previous week's nanny fees. She sends us a copy of the invoice a day earlier, Thursday, so that if there are any discrepancies we have time to raise them before our credit card is charged for the full amount.

Each week we receive a copy of the invoice, but I'm notoriously bad about checking them. Why bother? We worked out a deal long ago that I'd hire our nanny for 25 hours each week, with a flexible schedule so that if I occasionally need her to work more hours, we can work that out between ourselves. Other than the occasional deviation (she sometimes works an extra 30 minutes here and there if I'm running late, and there was that week when my back was hurt where she worked some extra hours to help me out), the schedule is pretty solid. In fact, she can't work late -- she has to leave no later than 1:30 in order to be at the bus stop to pick up her son from school by 2:30 every day. The only exception is Thursdays, when she arranges for a neighbor to babysit her son so she can work an 11am-4pm shift for me instead of the typical 8am-1pm.

I went to the computer and pulled up the record of invoices I'd been copied on each week. The total was included right there in the subject line -- and every week I'd breezed past it, not really looking, assuming that if it was a couple of numbers off, that just accounted for the occasional extra 30 minutes or hour worked.

The weekly salary we'd agreed upon was $300 -- 25 hours' worth of childcare at $12 per hour.  And the first invoice was, indeed, for $300.

But slowly, through the weeks, the total had increased. To $320, then $350. $380.

Once it reached November, it increased even more. $400, $420.

For the past two weeks, she'd reported having worked an average of 37 hours a week. My invoice from the previous week alone was $486 -- 50% higher than our agreed-upon weekly budget.

"WTF?!?!?!" was basically my reaction on seeing this. Here I'd been sulking over a few stolen pralines, a pilfered jar of peanut butter, and in one week she'd managed to report nearly $150 worth of stolen hours.

And that's when I got on the phone.

To be continued...