New Year, New Babysitter

For some reason, Blogger is not letting me upload photos to this post.  I am hoping that this gets fixed!

We are getting back into the swing of things after a fun holiday.  As you would expect, Maggie loved Christmas.  She was all about opening gifts, and not necessarily caring what the contents were.  This made it easy for me to pack up over half of her presents to bring out at later dates. {Sneaky mom, ha ha ha!}

We also had a mini-vacation in Door County, WI over New Years Eve.  We rented a house with five other families and Maggie woke up each morning eager to play with "friends".  It was an exercise in sharing new toys for all of the kiddos!

It seems like every January is a transition time since Maggie arrived.  January 2011 was when I returned to work after maternity leave {sniff}, January 2012 was the start of our time with our babysitter, Michelle, and January 2013 will be the start of a different babysitter for Maggie. 

A few weeks ago, I received a call from Michelle at work.  Of course my first thought was to panic that something had happened to Maggie.  Thankfully, Maggie was fine, however, the news broke that Michelle's husband had taken a new job...in Georgia.  Thus, we were going to need to find a new babysitter.

I, of course, handled it very well... I broke down sobbing on the phone.  {Sorry about that Michelle!}.  We love Michelle and I was sad to have that come to an end.  And, it was a bit of a process for us to even find Michelle and I was just picturing having to do it all again.

Thankfully, someone was looking out for us.  Michelle's neighbor, D, who also watches children, just posted a new ad on Craigslist looking for another child the same day that Michelle called me.  Michelle gave me her phone number, and I called her ASAP.  She was happy to have found us through word of mouth (you know what kind of crazies you can deal with on Craigslist!) and took her ad down that day!

Another coincidence is that one of my colleagues sends her kids to this woman as well! 

We visited D's house last week and all went well.  Maggie had no problems diving into the stockpile of toys with D's twin 3.5 year old girls.

We have three more weeks with Michelle and then will transition to D at the end of the month.  Maggie will stay on the same schedule with D that we had with Michelle, and go to her house Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.  Fingers crossed that everything continues to work out!