YOU'RE FIRED!!!

I'm back. Yes, it's been a few years. I bought a house, got married, had a baby, and all that jazz. But here I am. So for those of you who have been saying to yourselves, "Where the heck did Anastasia go?" this is your lucky day.

The most recent news in the life of Anastasia Beaverhausen is my first firing. Yep, I fired someone. I suppose I've never fired anyone before because I've never really been in charge of anyone. Well, unless you count the cleaning ladies that came to our house once. They didn't do such a good job, so I told their supervisor that we would not have them back. Not sure if that really counts as firing because I didn't say anything along the lines of "you're fired" or "termination effective immediately."

Anyway, my first firing was that of a nanny. Not a full-time nanny. The hubs and I provide the majority of the care for our daughter. But since we both work full-time, we thought it would be very responsible to hire someone to watch the daughter in our absence. Actually, before the nanny the daughter went to a daycare for four weeks, until we decided to pull her out of there after several incidents of diaper rash so severe that they required medical treatment and being fed cookies and crackers instead of milk. The daughter, six months at the time, hardly had teeth. Who would think that cookies and crackers were a good food option?

I digress.

So after we pulled the daughter out of daycare (that wasn't firing, right?) we were lucky to have some of our friends, such as Pretty, Pretty Princess Di, jump in to care for the daughter while we scrambled to find a new caregiver. We interviewed several candidates and decided on one, whom we'll call the nanny.

Things with the nanny started out great. Over time, though, it seemed that she was viewing her job as more of an inconvenience, despite the hefty salary she was being paid. The nanny made big bucks, especially considering the daughter slept about half of the time the nanny was "working." I put "working" in quotation marks because the nanny did very little. Unless you consider being on facebook, reading, and giving yourself manis and pedis work. The final straw was when the nanny left the daughter in her bed nearly four hours past the up-and-at-'em time. Unfed. The daughter hadn't eaten for 18 hours, but the nanny thought it would be better to leave her in her bed because she thought she was tired. Perhaps the nanny's nails weren't dry, so there was no way she could tend to the daughter. Who knows? Just a theory. Moreover, the nanny contacted the hubs' mother to defend her decision to let the daughter stay in the crib all day! Hello? Boundaries, anyone? Have you ever contacted your boss' mother because you were disgruntled about something at work? I doubt it.

So I fired the nanny. Sadly, it wasn't nearly as Donald Trump-like as it could have been. Rather, the nanny was given a clear and specific list of reasons why she was being terminated. Effective immediately. Yep, I said it. (Thanks PPP-Di for encouraging me to add that part.) The nanny's response was to un-friend all of our friends (most of whom the nanny had never met, yet she thought she'd like to be "friends" with all of them) on facebook.

We're glad to be rid of the nanny. We don't need that kind of drama in our lives. The daughter deserves better. I hope to never be in a position to fire someone again. Maybe Hallmark makes a card with Donald Trump on it, and when you open it, it says "You're fired!" That would be the way I'd go about firing people in the future. But hopefully I won't have to do it again.