Baby sat

Our first professional babysitter went off without much of a hitch.

The biggest problem was using an online-only agency. We could book, but not give any special instructions. And I really did feel that when sitting a kid for the first time, a heads-up about what they're like would be useful. But there was no way to put that info in the booking, and they only contacted me via SMS, with no return number. So there was no way to say the important essentials:

• She's walking and quite mobile, but can't manage stairs on her own yet.
• We use cloth nappies
• Take her to the loo whenever she wakes up – it usually means she has to go
• She will usually fight and complain when going to sleep
• We've no TV. Bring something to read or a laptop or phone.

That alone would have avoided the surprises the sitter had when she got here. Each datum we told her was followed by a bit of raised eyebrow making it clear this would not be a usual sit. Only the lack of TV warranted an Oh no! from the sitter, in that usual English ambiguously mock tone where you can't tell if they're serious or not.

I did spend the effort in the afternoon setting up a guest wifi account so she could get online, but not access our intranet or require us to change our passkey afterwards. But she didn't bring anything internetly with her. On the uninformed front, I too didn't know what we were getting beyond someone with a female first name. I was more expecting a 20 year old net-savvy txt-maniac. Not the I've brought a newspaper grandmother we got. On the bright side, at least she'd seen cloth nappies before. 15 years ago.

Regardless, it went off as we'd hoped. We left the flat and heard not a peep from her. We got home at 1am and the girl was asleep. And when the girl next woke, she wasn't visibly distressed or anxious from having us gone.

This bodes well for future sittering. Though at £50+ for a night I'd really like to keep it to a minimum.

Baby sitter

Tomorrow we're getting our first real baby sitter. Hiring a professional to come in and look after the child while we go off to an evening wedding.

I really don't know the etiquette for this. We don't have a TV. I don't have any computers in the house I'm comfortable letting a stranger use. Do I give the sitter our Wifi key and tell her to bring a laptop or phone? Tell her to bring a good book? She's going to sit in our house for 7 hours – maybe 5 or so after the kid's gone to bed.

Do I provide food for her? The sitter, not the baby. The baby gets all the milk she needs (L's been pumping). Do I leave something for the sitter? Um, there's oatmeal and lemonade and some left-over pasta sauce in the fridge. And help yourself to espresso. Somehow I don't think that'd be too appealing.

And looking at our house from the perspective of a stranger — man it's unevenly cluttered. Yes, it's a bit messy. that we can tidy up. But a lot of things just have no "away". They came into the house after the baby was born and have just sat on a sofa or chair or table, and that's as away as they get. At least through some rather hard work in the past week from L we can now walk from one end of the nursery to the other without having to jump over something (which I can kind of pretend was a makeshift baby gate).

On a similar note, today she found the off switch for the router. She just crawled over and cheerily flicked the switch on the surge protector. Fortunately the PC plugged into it was off, but it killed the internet for a bit. Perhaps it was because I stopped her from pulling the books off the shelves? Regardless, I've got to find a way to have my stuff and her stuff coexist in the same rooms.