Hey, fellow parents and expats! I have a great story to share with you about how we found the best babysitters in Houston. We moved here from Australia over a year ago, and we wanted to enjoy the city as much as possible. But we didn’t have any family or friends nearby to help us with childcare. So we decided to look for a babysitter online, and we discovered Care.com, a website that changed our lives!
Care.com is awesome because it has a feature called CareCheck, which is a super detailed background check that every caregiver has to pass. It checks their Social Security Number, their criminal records, their sex offender status, and more. It makes us feel so much safer to leave our baby with someone who has passed the CareCheck. But wait, there’s more! Care.com also has a premium membership plan ($69/month) that gives you access to even more background checks. You can check if the caregiver has a good driving record, a first aid certification, and other things that are important for childcare. We signed up for the premium plan for a short time until we found our perfect sitter.
We posted an ad on Care.com, describing what we wanted from a babysitter, and we got tons of responses. We picked three candidates who had everything we were looking for: experience, language skills, pediatric CPR training, good reviews, and close location. We invited them to our home for a quick interview, where we asked them all kinds of questions.
We were still a bit nervous about leaving our baby with a stranger, so we did a paid trial with each sitter. We asked them to watch our baby for three hours while we went out for lunch. We told them to call us if the baby cried too much, and we would come back. This way, we could see how they got along with our baby and how our baby liked them.
Another thing we had to think about, especially as expats, was what if something happened to us while we were out. Driving in Houston can be crazy, and you never know what can happen. So we made an emergency care plan for our sitter, with all the important information about our baby, our doctor, and our local friends who could help if needed. As expats, we don’t have any family here, so having this backup plan was essential for us.
Being parents in a new city can be hard, but it can also be fun. Thanks to Care.com and their background checks, we found three amazing babysitters who became part of our support system. Now we can have fun and relax, knowing that our baby is in good hands. We can go out for dinner, have date nights, play games with our friends, and explore Houston. Cheers to the joys and challenges of parenting!
We would love to hear from you! How did you find a good babysitter or caregiver in a new city? Share your stories and tips in the comments below. 🌟
We were recommended one of our amazing babysitters through my child's school teacher. During one of our daughter's parent- teacher meetings her teacher asked how we were settling into Houston. We admitted it had been an adjustment without family support. She recommended the daughter of a past teacher who she knew well and who helped out at the school summer camps. She turned out to be great. This means our sitter is also familiar with the school if I need her to do the school pick up run and the school knows who she is. I also reached out to the parents in my daughter's class for any recommendations. One parent gave me the name of another school staff membe…