Today I got a call that we had a special delivery.  Would I be home between 12:00 and 12:15 to collect it?  At first, I thought this was a trick or a joke.  But I said yes and prepared myself for anything.  I mean, normally you don’t have to be there to receive a normal package. UPS or FedEx don’t call ahead to let you know they’re on the way.

So at 12:15 I found myself signing for a box of homemade chocolate chip cookies, still warm from the oven.  They turned out to be from our nanny agency.  We had hired so many babysitters over the summer that they thought it necessary to thank us by having a batch of homemade cookies delivered.  Sure, it was nice to get the very, very yummy cookies.  But it was a shock.  I can honestly say this is the first time I have been treated like a “high roller”, with unexplained gifts of appreciation like this.  Of course it makes sense now that babysitters would be what pushed us over.

Had we really been using that many babysitters?

Yes.  Yes, we had.  With Claire out of school and in lots of half-day camps, we had been burning through the sitters and camps.  It is nice (on the wallet) to have the kids back in school!

But Claire loved some of her sitters.  She would just play Legos with the best of them for hours, literally like 4 hours of straight Legos.  Lots of the sitters were  interesting people, too.  There were a couple of real musicians who had shows that night.  There was a screenwriter.  A police trainee.  Even some career sitters.  In the end, some great afternoons for Claire and some warm cookies just might be worth the small fortune we paid for then.