By Amy L. Hatch
Do you know how many babysitters we went through over the summer?
Three. Three! In less than two months! People, we were burning through sitters like a hot knife through butter. This one couldn’t change a diaper. That one had a scheduling conflict. The other one was always late.
Whatever, it sucked.
I was at my wit’s end by the time September rolled around and I washed back up on the shores of Chambana after three weeks at the ocean. It was time to get down to brass tacks and find someone — someone reliable and competent — to watch Henry while I worked.
Enter Sittercity.com.
*cue the choir of angels*
Sittercity.com is an online service that allows you to search for caregivers by location, and I found an ample supply of young women to chose from when I punched in my Urbana zip code — and here’s the thing, not all of them are students, meaning that you won’t lose them during breaks or summers.
The best part is that Sittercity.com offers a profile for each person in it’s database, so you can look at their availability, schedule and even a photograph before you ever contact them.
Those who are looking for a sitter, a nanny or even a dog walker, senior-care provider or tutor can access the site’s network in two ways — either through an individual membership or as an employee benefit through their employer.
But here’s the best part — Sittercity wants moms in Chambana to have access to their great network of caregivers, especially as the holidays approach. So they gave you an early gift — one free six-month membership to their site!
The monetary value is nothing to shake a stick at — normally it would cost you $60. But just think about the value of a great babysitter for a minute. To enter, leave a comment here telling us about your best — or worst — babysitter ever by 5 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 7. We’ll choose a winner at random.
Congrats to Lisa of Champaign — she’s our winner!
Bonus? ALL chambanamoms.com readers get a 15 percent discount on a membership by entering the code AVE15.
Run, don’t walk, to check out Sittercity.com. New Year’s Eve is right around the corner, yo.
Full disclosure: I have been a customer of Sittercity.com. They did not pay chambanamoms.com to review their site, and but they did provide us with one six-month membership valued at $59.94 for a lucky reader.
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Best Babysitter was just last week. She and her husband have been helping us out with our brood since this summer. When our 4th was born, they gave us 10 free hours of babysitter! It is the best baby gift we have received. We are thankful to have them in our lives, and also thankful that they will watch our boys on occasion (they are both busy students with other “real” jobs.)
This sounds like such a wonderful service! Thanks so much for sharing. We have such a hard time finding suitable sitters for our boys.
The only sitters I have are family–which has definite plusses and minuses. And believe me, sometimes the minuses outweigh the plusses!
I have barely expanded my sitter pool from family, and the few I have had are rarely available when I need them (even with plenty of notice and multiple time options). It definitely does not encourage me to ask a second time.
We don’t use babysitters often enough, just because I dread looking for a sitter. So maybe this site would be helpful!
thanks for posting this. We have/had a sitter that was one of my husband’s students, but she’s so darn expensive.
Sign me up! We only use family and so rarely go out together.
Sounds cool. It is hard to find a good sitter. We mostly use family & that is cool, but it would be great to have a bigger pool of people to choose from.
Also, we’ve had 2 really great sitters for our 13 mo old…one is his cousin (yeah!) and the other a young lady from our church.
What a great idea! We have no family in town and I’ve been getting grad students as sitters but they are expensive and I hate not having them around all year.
I can’t comment on best/worst sitter experiences because my 4-month old son has never had a baby sitter yet! But I’d love to be entered in the drawing, so that I can find a good sitter and get out of the house