Monday, March 29, 2010

She's hired; pre-Passover

We ended up going with Meredith.  While both girls were experienced and would have been fine, Meredith has a few extra things going for her:  she lives much closer and she has Wed free now.  In her interview, she said she would want to be paid 17-20/hour for three children (she said she looked it up on sittercity.com).  Yeah...far too overpaid for her experience level.  So when I made her the offer, I was curious to see if she would counter-offer or try to negotiate.  I didn't think she'd have the chutzpah to try....and I was right.  She accepted it as it was.  Its interesting that most people don't try to negotiate.  I have always negotiated at every job I've been offered.  I figure, 'you don't ask, you don't get', and employers never recind an offer.  I'm not always successful, but it never hurts to ask.  I read somewhere that this one of the reasons women are paid less than men for the same job level:  men are more willing to ask for a higher initial base salary.  When you then factor in % raises, it can add up to substantial differences across gender.  Take home lesson:  always ask for slightly more than you think you're worth.

We'll be obviously paying her less than Nicole, but now our out-of-pocket expenses will be a bit higher while we are paying both her and Nicole.  She'll probably start next week since this week is a holiday.

To celebrate the last day before Passover, we all went to IHOP last night.  First time out with everyone.  Jason and I are becoming more comfortable with taking the girls out, and we chose a restaurant that was 1) baby friendly and 2) we knew would be empty (it was).  I'm not a fan of breakfast-carb-yumminess, so I just has some fruit while Jason and Zev lived up the french toast and pancakes.  But that was fine with me...I just liked being out with everyone.  We did get looks from everyone who was there, of course.  We just kept the girls in their car seats and put them in the booths with us.  Worked fine.

Passover starts tonight but we aren't doing a full clean this year.  We're too tired.  As Jason said this morning:  'We're just staying in Egypt this year'.  Ha.  We'll do the dietary restriction, but there was no housecleaning, and we didn't switch plates this year.  I'm keeping Zev on his normal diet, since he eats a lot of beans/peas/corn/pasta, and I don't want him to live on yogurt and applesause all week (although he'd love that).  We are actually going to go to a seder tomorrow at a friend's house (checked...no one going has been sick recently) and then my mom and sister are coming over tomorrow night.  I'll be taking tomorrow off from work to help get things ready.  If we cook enough, we'll be able to have leftovers for most of the week, which will make things much easier...

1 comment: