Changes

So I got an email last Saturday evening from our babysitter. It said that she was very sorry but she was going to have to stop babysitting for us. She's pregnant, she has a 4 year old daughter, they just got a new puppy and now her husband is having some health issues. She's just feeling very overwhelmed right now and felt that it wasn't a great time for us to be depending on her. So that was it. No notice. Uh-oh...we need to find a babysitter ASAP!! So luckily we were able to work some things out with family to help us out for this week and we placed an ad on craigslist to try to find someone else. We got a bunch of responses and found several people that we were interested in. We made some calls and set up some interviews. And I think we may have found a winner!! We met Caitlin last night. She's 24 years old and has a 2 year old son. She works part time as an office manager but was looking for something to do in the morning. We just got a good vibe from her and right away she connected with Jasper. She wanted to hold him and she started making faces and noises and making him giggle and she really seemed to enjoy being silly with him. A couple of others that we met didn't seem so interested in Jasper and didn't connect with him in the same way. He clearly made his choice. I left messages with her references and am just waiting for them to call back, but assuming we don't hear anything terrible about her, we're going to offer her the job. We used to drop Jasper off with the last sitter, but now we are asking that the new sitter comes to our house and I think it'll work out really well. I'm really happy with the way things have worked out. It's all for the best, but it definitely added to my stress level this week.

Luckily I get to come home and see this:

Our new swing that we set up outside for Jasper:

Jasper is a crawling maniac. He is crawling all over the place and he is fast now! He pulls himself up to stand and is interested in anything he can get his hands on. (need to get a video of him standing and some pictures) He switches from sitting to crawling to kneeling back to crawling to sitting to standing... He is SO busy and active...it's crazy to watch. And I just keep thinking how different he is from just a month ago because now he is all over the place and so much more independent. Sometimes I wish he would just sit quietly and snuggle in my arms but he's not so interested in that anymore. He wants to go exploring, which I guess is the goal as parents. We want our kids to want to discover what else is out there and be curious in the world around him. As long as he still snuggles with me some of the time :)