After going through about 50 email responses to our Craig’s List and newspaper postings and half a dozen phone interviews, we have found a nanny. It was actually a lot easier than we thought it would be. There’s a place in town where people looking for work hang out, and she was there with some of the guys. She said she has lots of child care experience. Well, really she just said “Yes” to every question we asked. She promised she’d leave him with plenty of food and water if she had to leave during the day.

But seriously, we did find a nanny. She’s got extensive infant care experience and worked at a daycare center and has a degree in early childhood education. She’s worked at a bank for the last several years but has been thinking of becoming a full-time nanny for a while when she saw our ad. Plus, we like her. We talked to several people who were perfectly well qualified, but didn’t quite gel. Obviously if we’re going to be seeing her every day and discussing Conrad’s growth and happiness and development with her, we want someone who can hold up her end.

Maybe we can add blogging to her list of responsibilities and not go three weeks between posts anymore.

Now of course we have to figure out what to call her. I think we’ll follow the convention from the movie “The Nanny Diaries” and call her Nanny. Maybe we’ll insist she call herself that, too.

“I have to go to the DMV Friday, so I’d like to leave a little early.”

“I’m sorry, what did you say, Nanny?”

“Alright, fine. Nanny has to go to the DMV Friday, so Nanny would like to leave a little early.”

“Absolutely not.”

I’ve just uploaded about three weeks worth of photos to Conrad’s Flickr page, and by the time I’d finished writing captions for some of them, I realized I’d used up all my blog post ideas. Also, I am very tired. So, go look at photos.

We received a book as a shower gift called Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. A good friend of ours also confirmed that this was very useful when their daughter was young.

I finally cracked it open a couple of days ago when Conrad started something new: not sleeping. To be truthful, he was sleeping well at night – waking a couple of times to eat, but mainly sleeping from about 9pm to 7 or 8am. But he decided that daytime sleeping was for the birds. Or in our case, the cats.

The book says that babies of his age should never have more than 2 hours of wakefulness. Doing the math, this means once he wakes up and I feed him, he’s got about another hour before he’s supposed to be sleeping again. I tried swaddling, rocking, walking, jiggling, shushing and endlessly repeating, “Go to sleep. Go to sleep.” to no avail.

On Wednesday, he napped in the morning for 2 hours but then was awake from noon to 7pm, at which time he was down for the night. On Thursday, he was up from 7am until 6pm, with a few short catnaps in between. My nerves were a little frazzled.

Today, we have a new approach. Instead of picking him up and rocking him back to sleep when he wakes up 5 minutes after the previous attempt, I left him in his crib. He doesn’t cry, he just sort of flails about, breaking the swaddle and looking like he’s surely wide awake. This has been going on for an hour and a half. And miraculously, he’s actually falling asleep for long periods of time between flails.

Maybe he’s just trying to convey that he no longer enjoys the swaddle.

My grandmother turned 90 yesterday. We, sadly, couldn’t be there as we didn’t think we could manage the trip to Michigan with young Conrad in hand. Also, they threw the party on a Thursday. That’s what happens when all the children of the birthday girl are retired and don’t think about work schedules anymore.

I spoke with her this morning and she said the celebration was extraordinary. I think that means she was pleased.

Wow – we haven’t posted anything since the end of March. How can be? It’s certainly not because Conrad hasn’t done all sorts of wonderful and cute things, but more that we’re caught up in the day to day caring and feeding of our little baby. I’m feeling especially fond of him right now because he’s sleeping in his swing.

The big news in our lives is that we’re looking for a nanny. After waiting to hear of an open spot on four different daycare waiting lists, we finally decided that rather than put him one geographically inconvenient place to potentially move him to a more geographically convenient place and then ultimately put him in Dave’s work daycare, that we’d hire someone to come to our home until Dave’s work daycare has an availability.

All grandparents and other well wishers may breathe a sigh of relief.

We’ve placed some ads and are also working with an agency under the heading of ‘use all available avenues’. We’ve gotten some good responses and some not so good responses from our ad, so the next step is to have some phone interviews and see where that leads us.

In the case that you’re reading this and live in this area, do let us know if you happen to know of a wonderful nanny who is looking for employment beginning in May.

Lots more new pictures added to the Flickr page, too.