I haven’t mentioned this yet, except once to Mom in a Skype call. Things have just been super busy lately, and anyway it didn’t look like it was going to happen for another week. But things change fast around here!

So a few weeks ago, SS and I decided that our long term plan for taking care of Alana (especially once SS goes back to work) is to hire a full-time nanny. After comparing the costs, and thinking about it a bit longer term, we decided it made a lot of sense (and was within our financial means) to hire an English-speaking Filipina nanny.

So, to make a long story short, all in the span of one day, we interviewed a nice lady named Jenny, hired her, she moved in with us, and the Chinese yuesao has moved out already! Kinda crazy that it all happened in the span of a day. (We weren’t planning to kick out the Chinese yuesao immediately, but the agency needed her if she was free, and she needs to keep finding new jobs to earn a living…)

Anyway, Jenny is super nice, 34 years old, Catholic, and has two kids back in the Philippines aged 11 and 14 she’s supporting. Her English is pretty good, although not amazing. She’s really sweet, though.

Already I’m seeing changes in SS, who has to manage the new nanny. Whereas before, SS could kind of be lazy and let her mother handle a lot of that, the language barrier means SS now has to step up. So she’s learning how to say things like “walk the dog” and “bring in the laundry” which she just never had to learn the proper English for before. This is really good practice for SS; she hasn’t had much reason to use English at all since she earned her MBA.

So, God willing, our new nanny will be with us for a while. It’s a little weird, but I’m really happy that we’ll creating more of an English-speaking atmosphere in our home, which means that Alana will have a much easier time growing up truly fluent in English. This also means she’ll have to work less at (and we’ll have to invest less into) improving her English in the future. We’re making the investment now, and it’s going to pay dividends our daughter’s whole life.

So we’re pretty happy about the situation. More details later…