the babysitter fiasco

The title of this post makes it sound like we had a babysitter and some fiasco ensued... but we haven't even had her over yet.  The fiasco happened just trying to get a babysitter.

Ok, so how many of you have actually gotten into an almost shouting match with your co-parent over finding a babysitter?  Last week, I found myself in one of the more absurd situations...  fighting over going out on a date?  crazy crazy crazy

Here's what happened.

We needed a babysitter.  It always seemed like a normal, natural thing to do in life.  Have a kid.  Have a babysitter who comes over every now and then, and the parents go out to dinner.

Little did I know that FINDING a babysitter can be so stressful...

So I got on our neighborhood Nextdoor website and asked if anyone had suggestions.  A few people wrote back:
1) the lady who said her high school aged daughter babysits
2) the highschool age girl who said she'd love to babysit
3) the guy who suggested urbansitter.com
4) a week later, the lady who used to nanny and is currently in between jobs as a therapist

(#1 struck me as a bad idea from the get-go)

I chose option 2, and she came over two weekends in a row.  The first time, I was home the whole time and she and M got along well.  The second time, she stayed for 2 hours and I left for about 1 hour and 30 minutes to run errands, just before lunch.  This went really well, and everything looked good for the dinner I knew was coming up.  My friends and I had 3 dates to choose from, and so I ran them all by the babysitter and chose the date that worked best for her.

Then she texted a couple of days later and said that she needed to babysit her brother that night...  oof.

So, I wrote to #4, who didn't get back to me for a while.

And I turned to #3.

Have you checked this site out?  It's pretty cool.  I signed up, tried contacting sitters one-by-one, and that didn't go too well as we need a sitter who has a car (our house is inconvenient for public transportation in the evenings).  So then I figured out that you can post a job and sitters contact you.  About 20 potential sitters contacted me within hours.  Yippee!

A few of them looked absolutely perfect, one especially so.  She had 20+ excellent reviews, about 10 repeat families, and had replied to my interview questions in such a great way.  M can be very shy and wary of strangers, and I loved how she said she handled those kinds of kids.

I had been keeping Dh updated on the sitter search for the 3 weeks this had been going on.  But apparently, in one ear and out the other.

When I ran my top 2 choices from Urbansitter past him, he nixed the whole thing.  Something about letting a stranger who we know nothing about into our house, about online stuff being fake, about him being a really concerned and protective parent, wanting three references he could call personally, etc.

Perfect sitter #1 responded that, if her 20+ excellent reviews weren't enough, then perhaps we weren't the best fit for each other.  She was very diplomatic and classy, but I could read between the lines that the request had crossed the line and she thought we were a bit too paranoid (as I knew she likely would... I mean really, how many people would set up 20+ different facebook accounts, arrange sitter jobs for herself and pay for them online over the course of about 18 months, etc.)

This set off the second phase of the argument.

I felt kinda backstabbed.

Was Dh trying to imply that I'm a bad parent because I'm willing to bring a babysitter into our house?

Did he really not notice how much effort I was putting into this, and that I'd spent hours and hours and hours on this effort, only for him to nix everything at the very last minute? I totally think he has veto power over parenting decisions, but if he didn't like my methodology, he shoulda done the vetoing long before I was that invested.

He also didn't seem to understand why I wanted to go out to dinner with friends of ours that we really enjoy and hadn't seen in about a year (wait, I saw them about 6 months ago, but he decided not to go at the last minute b/c he didn't like someone else who'd been invited too), and why I wanted him to go too (he'd offered to stay home).

And why was I so keen to go out to eat?  He pointed out that the three of us go out to dinner once a week.

Ugh!  Does he really not notice that our toddler sits in my lap through every one of those dinners?  That I order a meal based on what she'll likely eat some of?  That I take her to the bathroom at least three times?  That I am the one who gets food-smeared?  Don't get me wrong, I love those dinners.  But a toddler-restaurant experience is so not the same thing as a dinner with adults...  I mean, really?

And, he seemed to forget that these sitters were all coming to our house not knowing a thing about us.  We could be complete freaks trying to lure them in with promises of a cute kid, but then tie them up in the basement (although, for the record, we don't have a basement).  Seems to me like there comes a time when you gotta have some mutual trust here, and if you can't recognize that, then, I don't know...

We ended up finding a sitter on the urbansitter site that works at our university, and had lunch with her yesterday.  She is terrific.  Doesn't seem as fun as the first one I was leaning towards and scared away, but otherwise excellent on all levels. And Dh agreed.

So, the sitter-sitch worked out, but geez.  I had no idea it would be this hard.

Are we the only ones? What is the next thing like this that I won't see coming, but ought to be forewarned about?