Morning-After Babysitting

The thing with getting a sitter is it thrusts you temporarily into pre-baby mode.

You find yourself out at a lively restaurant amazed that other people apparently have maintained the social life that you abandoned postpartum. You’re ordering fabulous food with menu-item names you don’t thoroughly understand (Ligurian ravioli), but you’re throwing culinary caution to the wind! And of course, you’re having a glass of wine–or two or three. Baby? What baby? We are young(ish) and social and fabulous! Watch us eat and drink! Watch us make witty banter.

Last night we went out to our favorite neighborhood restaurant, A Cote, with Mark’s cousin Maggie, her charming BF Josh, and Maggie’s friend from home (Lexington, KY) who is in the Bay Area being trained for her odd sales job–selling high-end surgical tables. (As Kevin would say, “My career counselor sucked. Who knew these jobs existed?!”) We had a grand evening, and even felt compelled to cap it off with a drink at the local tiki bar.

At this point your baby is a hazy memory. The closest you come to thinking of her is when, in a moment of tiki-bar abandon, you consider showing off your c-section scar. (Don’t worry, I somehow resisted the urge.)

This is all going some place very obvious, right? When Kate woke up at 3AM and again at 6, the crushing reality that you *do indeed* have a baby bore down on you. Trust me, it’s no fun shuffling to get your baby out of bed while you try to recount just what you drank the night before. I guess this is why people like Britney Spears have nannies.

For us non-millionaires, I’ve come up with a sure-fire solution: a morning-after babysitter. (If you read on, consider that you have in essence signed an NDA and will not make off with this brilliant get-rich-quick scheme. And I didn’t even go to business school!) How it would work is you’d call Bruno’s Morning-After Babysitting Service (or some such) and could either pre-schedule having a sitter come to your house in the early morning hours after a night out, or–for quite a premium–you could call and request a sitter right when you need one–in the very painful early morning hours.

Think of what an exhausted, dehydrated, barely functional parent would pay for this! The upside is staggering.