This thread really brings back memories of when my kids were small - and nearly all the memories are bad.
The prime babysitting age is 14-16. Once they hit 16 they can get a job with a fairly regular schedule if they want money. Anything under 14 and you want to hire a sitter for the sitter.
Plus, we had three kids (twin boys with a sister who was only 2 1/2 years older) and a lot of potential sitters wouldn’t even consider taking them on for an evening. They were good kids, but they simply overwhelmed a teenager. Even a lot of the brave ones did it once or twice and then gave up.
My wife was a teacher, and even she couldn’t get any of her more reliable students to sit for us. As for the kids’ daycare providers, they flatly refused to babysit for any of the families in the preschool.
No nearby family, either, so that was out.
As a side note, none of my kids ever showed the slightest interest in sitting when they were old enough, although my daughter would do it occasionally as a favor for one family.
It takes a lot of time and effort to find a sitter you can trust. If your friends said they couldn’t find one, take them at your word.
This is exactly my situation. I work all day and so does our son’s dad. Fortunately, like Shagnasty we have a wonderful daycare with teachers he knows who are willing to babysit. We don’t take advantage of it often; however, I do occasionally find myself taking advantage of the fact that my son is in daycare by taking a day off to get things done (like today and Monday). I usually cluster my doctor’s and dentist’s appointments around a day or two and take those days off so I can also get the house clean and work in the garden so our yard doesn’t look like the Clampets’. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a half hour or so to myself before I pick my kid up early and take him to the zoo or the park.
I have no problem with leaving my kid with someone I trust, but I will admit that I do think about him a lot even when I’m out. Obviously, I’m not calling the sitter every second, but it’s funny how even if they’re not occupying every second of your time while they’re there, they still occupy your mind when they’re not.
Ditto, except my kid is 10 months. For my husband’s cousin’s wedding a few weeks ago, we actually had my parents visit for the weekend to watch him - because I just don’t have any teenagers around here that I trust yet. We’re about to start ‘breaking in’ the daughter of my in-law’s family friends, so hopefully, we will have a good sitter here soon, but I don’t know that many teenagers, and the ones I do know are older and have part-time jobs already.
And I also work full-time, so I don’t typically WANT to go out without my son on the weekends. We do let him spend a couple of hours with his grandparents on a Saturday or Sunday usually so that we can do some cleaning or run to the grocery store and get it done a lot faster, but it’s like pulling teeth for me to agree - I only agree to it because I know how much they’d like him to come over and play. Otherwise, we’d spend our entire weekend as a family - it goes by much too quickly.
Finding a reliable sitter that isn’t family has proven to be much more difficult than I ever thought. But wanting to go anywhere without the baby when I’m with him and when I’m away from him during working hours has been even more difficult.