The Beginning

Welcome to my first blog and post! This is where I'm going to document my life as a nanny, everything from my successes, fails, trials, venting, and experiences as a whole. This post will just be a little background of what led up to the present. So that being said I've been a nanny for a little over a year to a fantastic little 2 year old boy (who I'll refer to as AC), but it wasn't always fantastic, nor did I ever think I would become a nanny OR be great at it! Before nanny life I just worked at the regular kind of monotonous retail management job and the biggest thing I had to worry about was whether or not someone would call out and if I'd work with a bad associate. Trying to balance school, friends, family, and a 20 hour a week job thinking that life was hard and stressful. So what events led up to me being a nanny? Good question! I was a sales leader working a closing shift with a associate that was a mom she was telling me how she thought I'd make a great mom and nanny, and thats when she told me about this website where families hired nannies through, she also told me the type of money I could be making. I blew her off not really thinking about it much until one day my store manager and I got into an argument and I had it, I went home looked up the website made a profile and started applying to jobs. I got interviews right away and ended up getting the first nanny job I interviewed for which coincidentally wasn't the one I wanted, but was obviously the one I was meant to have, and bam I've been there since.
At first nanny life was terrible and I hated it, I was over worked, over stressed, and had no idea what the hell I was doing. I had never changed a diaper before let alone cleaned up vomit before. My first day alone I put on a diaper backwards, had AC puke all over himself, the floor, and me, and got lost on my way from their house to the library! I wanted to quit the first week but I couldn't stand the thought of crawling back to my terrible horrible nazi store manager begging for my position back so I stuck it out. It didn't get any better for a while, I thought AC was weird and he wasn't the biggest fan of me at first and believe me the feeling was mutual, he use to do STRANGE things when I would call him "zombie baby," hate me all you want it was the truth. After a few months I finally started to figure out nanny life, and started changing things up. When I started AC was completely non verbal and had some non documented diagnoses of Autism, he didn't keep eye contact, was ADDICTED to the T.V, had poor motor skills, and always seemed very unemotional and emotionally detached. The previous nanny was a useless piece of flesh that did nothing but pop him in front of the TV. I honestly had no idea where to start, I just followed my instincts and started with his emotions for goodness sake AC didn't even know what a hug or kiss was! My first day without a parent home, and after the puke was clean I started teaching him I started with kiss. By the end of the first day he was the master of kiss, and once I realized that not only was he eager to learn but he could learn quickly AC and I started our learning adventures! In the matter of 6 months he was verbal, forming words, excelling in motor skills, knew all of his ABC's, 123's up to 15, was no longer being looked at as an Autistic child, I cut the TV addiction right out, and he was verbalizing his emotions! It was a great accomplishment and still is because everyday he learns something new and I'm helping him!!! Needless to say I am now loving, thriving, excelling, and crazy happy with where I am now and where AC is now in development. So that is what this blog will be about my life, my nanny life, AC's development, my nanny secrets for teaching, handling parent/child issues, and education secrets that worked for me! Hope you'll follow me on my adventures!

XoXo Nicole