I “LOVE” my Frances Stewart Baby Nurse

I want you to notice that this blog post is not written by Eli, something so hysterically funny happened that I had to come out of blogger retirement for this one.

Bless my mom, who wanted to make my life easier.  She hired a baby nurse for us to sit up with our newborn all night so we could get some rest.  She did that with our first son also and it was an enormous help.

The agency called as we were about to leave the hospital and said something about her being vegan and bringing her own food.  Whatever, we have our own dietary restrictions so we were totally cool with that, and vegan meant that she would be way less likely to treif up our kitchen.

Eli picked her up and she did have a bag of produce in tow.  However it quickly became apparent that this lady ate a LOT of veg.  And soon informed us that she would need to make regular trips to Whole Foods for us to purchase fresh organic produce for her just about every other day.

Later the same day she speculated aloud “Oh maybe I should close the door to the bathroom when I use it” aloud, after I walked by.

For two days we indulged Marlene’s organic produce habit, while she learned to close the door to the bathroom and spent hours and hours chopping her organic produce while our baby slept. 

Then came day three, she informed us it was time for her walk with the baby.  We asked her to delay until Eli and I could regroup, feeding the kid and catering for a crowd on Shabbos.  And I started to think, maybe this woman, who was sitting up with our child was more work than the child itself.

Finally, she asked me where I keep the bottled water in our house. We don’t have bottled water in our house, I don’t drink bottled water, my husband doesn’t drink bottled water and neither of my children drink bottled water.  It was at this point that I realized that the newborn was nowhere near as much of a pain as Marlene was, and we asked her to leave.  (Or rather in a particularly hormonal postpartum moment I sobbed “ELI MAKE HER GO AWAY NOW”)

After she left we realized she did accomplish Mom’s goal, she had given us the confidence in our parenting to parent independently, to relax around our kids and really enjoy them, just possibly not the way the Marlene or the Francis Stewart Agency would have intended.

I thought that was where the humorous interlude ended.  However, Monday, after our son’s bris, we got this in the mail.  And thus the humorous interlude is truly complete.