About Janet

Before I go on about my intense history with kids, let me first emphasize that one of my favorite things about children is that they make fun and happiness effortless. As you read about my experience with children, please remember that unlike many, I understand on a visceral level that if children are not having fun or are in a state of worry, they do not respond to learning and positive development well. This is something I am good at-- sneaking in learning experiences and disguising them as fun, funny, or their idea. In high school, I began taking my child supervision superpowers from regular and unofficial babysitting to working in the nursery of the church I had essentially grown up in due to my mom's employment there and my artistic and musical involvement there. Then, from 2008 until 2012 I was nanny to a family with a little boy and his younger sister. The boy's autism necessitated extra help for his mother due to the great amount of work involved in not only caring for a 29-month-old with special needs but also caring for a 16-month-old sibling as well. This was no ordinary nannying situation. I was called upon to provide the standard nannying services such as laundry, housework and food preparation. In addition, though, I was also responsible for heavily involved participation in James s therapy. When I took him to his sessions, I stayed there with him. But I did not just sit in the waiting room reading magazines. Through requested permission, I always accompanied him into therapy making sure to stay out of the way and acquired extensive training and learning through observation as well as input from the therapists to help transfer these therapeutic activities to his home environment and carry them out there as well in a variety of settings and approaches. I read books to supplement my knowledge and I worked interactively with James in more places than many parents would care to try, including at playgrounds, in pools, in the back yard, at the dinner table, in the car, at the store, and any place we happened to be. I organized and carried out focused cognitive and behavioral development activities at the table and off. I became an integral part of his overall therapy, which is something many parents with special needs children miss out on because they are exhausted, don t know how to round out their child s treatment to a whole-life experience, or don t realize they can or should. This extensive experience I have comes into play with every interaction I have with a child. I have seen the best and have handled the worst, and my life is much fuller from it and what I have to offer is expanded from it. Following my time with that family, I spent a year-and-a-half babysitting two young girls. I supervised them after school until their parents were home from work, utilizing my exceptional experience and knowledge in both behavioral and cognitive disciplines as well as my experience in having fun to help foster healthy relationships, conversations and habits. When I decided it was time to do homework, I did not merely enforce the doing of it. Rather, I would involve myself when appropriate and provide tutoring founded in my natural skills, my lifelong obsession with language, my TESOL training, and my experience with involved engagement in a special needs setting. The girls also both played piano, something I was particularly happy about. As a pianist of 22 years and a musician of always (not to mention the daughter of a piano teacher), I made sure to sit down and involve myself with their practicing, because at ages 6 and 8, the last thing you want to do is sit there and focus on music for 20 or 30 minutes after you've been in school all day. I understand this personally and had to work through it myself as a child, which gives me helpful insight for assisting them through the struggle of work that pays off. In my time with these girls and boys, their performance, behavior, grades and piano skills improved, and we developed a strong relationship that not only consisted of work and following directions but, quite ridiculously importantly, always involved creative play and a really good time. *If you have yourself noticed the strange lack of apostrophes and quotation marks, it is not because you are crazy or obsessive, but because I have put them there and the Care. com website has decided that these marks of punctuation are unnecessary and either left them out entirely or replaced them with spaces. The point? I am a pretty detailed person, especially when it comes to creating copy in a professional setting, so please know that the absence of the apostrophes is not my doing and I am rather displeased with this inaccurate display of information. :)