Play games, all sorts...

Today was Zachary's first day with his new nanny! Meh and she had met several months before at that parent-baby class we've been taking; J is a SAHM whose son T is about a month older than Zachary. We'd actually attempted a few previous short nannying "dry runs", but the first was cancelled due to a snow and ice storm, and the other due to Zachary's new playmate being under the weather. So nannying ended up starting off with a full day, as both Meh and I were working. (Of course, we'd visited J's lovely home before, and she and Zachary and T all get along wonderfully!)

Meh checked in by phone at her lunch break, and it sounded like everyone had been having a good day - Zachary had already taken a nap, the three of them had gone for a nice walk, and had all played together too. I headed over to pick Zachary up after work, and caught the three of them on the tail end of another walk. My first view was of the two boys both conked out in the stroller as it came up the driveway, looking extremely cute indeed!

Zachary had a fabulous time, adding exersaucer, jumperoo, and more play time to the morning's activities. Oh, and he even had 3 successful naps, including a long one in his previously dreaded carseat! I'll have to get tips from J on how she does it. J and T were introduced to some of Zachary's favorite tunes (yup, I made up his very first mix CD), which everyone seemed to (hopefully? :) enjoy as well. From the sound of it, the primary challenge was figuring out the cryptic series of levers, snaps, and handles one needs to click/twist/push in a specific order to get the pack-n-play to open up. I hopefully sorted it out when I came to pick up Zachary.

It'll be interesting to see if Zachary starts emulating some of T's behaviors - T already rolls over, sits up, and is fairly talkative. One great piece of advice we got from friends of ours when they started having their daughter nannied (does that word work as a verb there?) was to avoid the fear of your child reaching major milestones when you're not present; their advice (which we are adopting ourselves) is that J should wait for us to tell her about new things that Zachary has been doing, rather than her telling us about new developments - that way, we can experience the joy of seeing him do things for the "first" time, even if he does something when we're not present. Granted, at one to two days a week of nannying, the odds are pretty good we'll catch new activities at home, though with a slightly older friend to start emulating, who knows if he'll be more inspired to try things to impress baby T?