Yes, that’s right - the Ex, G, and I are now members of a babysitting co-op. Sure, I haven’t sat for anyone else yet, and okay, no one has sat for me yet, either, but… I am SO excited. No more pricey babysitters! Hooray! The first co-op meeting is on Tuesday and I will have the chance to meet other parents in our neighborhood babysitting co-op. After that, I can start sitting.

I’m excited for many reasons:

1. We’ll save money. Instead of $50 for a sitter on a night out, we’ll pay $0. Not too shabby.

2. Our son will be cared for by parents we know and trust. Why pay for a teenage sitter when we can have experienced parents watch our child?

3. It’s fun for our son. He gets to play with other kids while in the care of another parent. Win-win.

4. We meet other parents in the community. A babysitting co-op is a nice way to become integrated into the community and meet others nearby with similarly aged children.

On a semi-related note: the Ex and I saw our regular babysitter while taking a walk last week. As we haven’t used her in a while, she was playing an avoidance game. So awkward. I kept waiting, trying to make eye contact with her, but to no avail. Finally, the Ex prodded me away, before I could accost her.

(Visit Sitting Around for more info: www.sittingaround.com)

The price of babysitting is staggering. When I babysat as a teen (barely a decade ago), I remember earning $4 per hour - sometimes $5 if the family was feeling generous. When I first started searching for a sitter for my son just a few years ago, I made the mistake of asking prospective sitters what their rates were.

“I don’t sit for less than $15 an hour,” a high school sophomore informed me. $15 an hour? For sitting on my couch while my baby slept, eating my food and watching my cable TV?

Finally, I found a reasonable grad student who was okay babysitting Gavin for $10 an hour - the max I felt comfortable paying. While she is great with him, the knowledge that dinner and a movie costs me an extra $60 or so when babysitting is included prevents me from having very many nights out.

Recently, I found myself griping to yet another mother about the prohibitive cost of hiring a babysitter. Her response? “You should join a babysitting co-op.” I had never heard of babysitting co-ops before, but once she explained the concept to me, I couldn’t believe I had spent so long without one.

A babysitting co-op is a group of parents in a community that trade babysitting services with one another. Rather than paying each other in money, co-op members pay each other in points. You earn points by watching your friends’ kids and - when you need a sitter - they earn points by watching yours. The idea of exchanging babysitting services with people you know and trust (and for free!) is beyond appealing to me.

I have just begun researching potential babysitting co-ops in my area, and no leads so far. If I can’t find a co-op in my area, I’m determined to start one myself. Though, I have to say, creating a co-op and managing it myself sounds like a good deal of work…

People are f-ing crazy.

A 33-year old American woman named Nadya Suleman just had a set of octuplets, bringing her total number of children to fourteen. Fourteen! Holy hell. And, the oldest of the children is seven. She has fourteen children under the age of eight.

Just reading this story online yesterday made me want to lie down and take a nap. How does one parent fourteen small children? Suleman is not married and is on welfare - all fourteen of her children were conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF). While I am all for women raising children on their own if they so desire, I think it is highly irresponsible to purposely impregnate oneself that frequently. And, to rub salt into this wound, the woman receives public assistance. Tax payers are supporting Suleman’s little hobby. Suleman’s mother explains that her daughter is “obsessed with children.”

So unbelievably irresponsible. No one knows how Suleman was able to convince a doctor to implant eight embryos at once, especially in a woman under 35 with six other children. The father of all fourteen kids is reportedly a neighbor of Suleman’s who had donated his sperm. However, this neighbor recently married, according to the Telegraph, and asked Suleman to stop using his sperm to conceive children. Clearly, she did not comply with his wishes.

I hope someone examines Suleman’s mental health and evaluates her ability to care for that many kids. So sad.