Homeschool Spanish Lessons - Online Learning

Rob and I belong to the new breed of later life parents who seem to have 1 thing in common: we have been very slow to have any kind of childcare for our children; even babysitters.

In fact until a few weeks ago when my mom hired a woman to watch the baby and her cousin during my dad’s 80th birthday party, neither of my kids had ever had a babysitter. Now we’ve been fortunate enough to have Rob’s mom, known as Nana, here a couple of times a year, for stretches up to even 6 weeks last summer. That has been great. But no outside childcare, no leaving our kid with friends, no teenagers, nada!  Part of that has been because we just didn’t have somebody right off hand that we knew would be reliable, and I guess the other part was not wanting anybody to look after them other than us. 

But with the big new overhaul I’m doing to the e-learning system in order to accommodate homeschoolers, as well as just to make the entire system more user friendly, I’m having to work more hours than I have since having the kids. And even getting up at 6 am, I found that the couple of hours I got to myself didn’t make enough of a difference to truly boost my productivity.  So I finally admitted that unless I found somebody to help me, this project was never going to even get off the ground.

So I bit the bullet and called my church, a couple of local kids places, and put an ad on Craigs List. Amazing! It felt good just to be doing something about it finally! I was amazed at how many responses I had to the Craigs List ad. I didn’t offer any great salary, but I did offer 20 hours a week, every week. Also as the job is in my home, and I will be here most of the time, perhaps that gave it added appeal as it’s not quite so much responsibility. Well after interviewing 4 or 5 people, I happily settled on a local grandma named who is CPR certified and very into education, has tons of childcare experience in professional as well as home settings, and just plain loves kids.  ¡Gracias a Dios!

It took me a long time to get to this point, and I might not have done it at all if I hadn’t been prodded a bit by my own mother, but I can tell you that sitting here today having gotten a few solid hours of work in, life is pretty good. Way beyond that though – it’s just better for my kids. Trying to balance working and semi ignoring 1 or both of them is just not good for anybody.  This way I’m still here, I can hold  1 of them part of the time while she helps with the other one, and the happiness quotient has gone up for both of them.

So if you’re a stay at home mom struggling to work with small kids, I say just DO IT – put an ad on Craigs List, call your local church, do whatever you can to find somebody to come into your home and help you.  You’ll be surprised at how affordable it will be – and if you’re generating income with your work, it should pay for itself in no time.