About me

I grew up in the second biggest city in Sicily, Italy. A placed called Catania, on the eastern coast of the island, under the watchful eye of the largest active volcano in Europe, Mt. Etna. I grew up with two sisters, one older and one younger. This taught me a lot about child development as I was able to recognize patterns in children’s behavior from a very early age, noticing the differences in how our parents raised each of us and as the middle child I was best suited to differentiate between how my parents treated us as our own people not with a one size fits all system. As a child I was like most little girls and loved playing with dolls, taking care of them, making them look perfect so I could take them everywhere I went, and pretending they were my own children. You could say that it’s been my dream since I was a little girl to be a mom, and I made that dream come true pretty early in life as I had my first son two weeks after I turned eighteen. A second child followed when I was 22, and it’s the greatest honor of my life to be able to call myself the mother of these two amazing men I raised with my husband of 25 years. Watching my children grow up made me realize that child care was what I did best, and what I wanted to do for my career so when we moved to America 19 years ago I threw myself head first in the babysitting career.

I started babysitting in 2003, helping to take care of my sister in law’s young children. This helped me a great deal picking up the English language, while also helping teach them my native language of Italian. My first job babysitting was with the Rella family, with their mom Angela who was looking for someone to help their 15-month-old daughter Lucia while her and her husband, Jim, worked. Two years after I joined, they had their second child, a little boy named Jojo. When I was first hired, Angela told me that Lucia had a lot of difficulty speaking. They couldn’t seem to get her to say many words and were starting to get worried. After a little bit of time of getting Lucia to trust me, I started insisting that she say the words of the things that she wanted. She’d gotten used to just pointing at things and being given them, so she felt no need to say the word. With a little bit of time and repetition, Lucia was a completely different child and her mom absolutely adored me for the accomplishment I was able to help Lucia with. After Angela went back to work, I was also absolutely ecstatic to babysit a newborn in Jojo as well. He was the absolute sweetest child, he almost never cried, and seeing him grow up into the little man that he is now means the absolute world to me knowing I had a small hand in that development. After the Rella family unfortunately was forced to move to Syracuse for work related reasons, I went on to work for the Zyelinsky family organizing the schedule for their two children Bellamy, 6, and Beckett, 9. The family was an economically fortunate family living in the upper east side of NYC, so Beckett had his own other babysitter a young woman named Sabrina. I was hired to help Bellamy with her packed schedule that involved swimming, gymnastics, tutors, soccer, piano, among many other things. This experience helped me appreciate the value of teamwork as Sabrina and I had to organize each other’s schedule daily making sure we never missed anything for the children and could cover for each other if ever necessary. Bellamy had some difficulties accepting and showing affection when I first started working with her. I’ll never forget after working my first day I tried to hug her goodbye her extreme discomfort in not knowing how to hug back. It was a moment that hurt me to my very soul, and I spent every second of my 3 years with the Zielinsky family showering that girl with love and affection at every possible turn until she was running to hug me goodbye and double checking that I’d be there in the morning to take her to school. My latest babysitting adventure was with the Palmese family where I worked daily with the mom, Vanessa, helping to take care of her three children Grace, who was about 6 months old when I joined, Roby who was 3, and Vincent who was 4. Vanessa was a stay at home mom but three children were a lot for her to handle so she’d hired me to help her. I cooked lunch and dinner for the family, my very favorite pastime, wrote down the schedule of the week for all three kids so we always knew where we had to be and when. I organized the children’s bags for school, play dates, and trips. As with every family I worked for I got approval from the parents to instill some rules and boundaries in the house, helping make sure that the children I work with are polite and have good manners. No child I’ve ever worked with has ever gotten anything without saying please and thank you. This also helps me do my job because I feel like the parents and I are part of a team with the common goal of having what’s best for the children at heart. I might still be working for the Palmese family to this day if I didn’t need to move back to Italy to help care for my parents who are in bad health.

The things that I love to do are being with my children, I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I have two adorable pets a seven year old American Bulldog named King, who was a gift from my oldest son, and a four year old Siberian cat named Mici (which translates to kitty in Italian). I spend as much of my free time with these four children of mine as I possibly can. My other hobbies are cooking for my family, reading romance novels, and listening to Italian music as I do my daily house activities. I try and teach all the children I work with as much Italian as their parents are comfortable with me teaching, I think that in a global world like the one we live in knowing multiple languages is a key advantage in any career industry the children will one day take on, and you can never know when a few words of Italian can help them in their future. My philosophies in childcare are that the child must always come first, and I always try and ask that the parents trust me to help the child learn what will make them the best people. I am not the type of person who will spoil the child all day long so that the child will love me and rave about me to their parents. I would prefer to have a relationship with the parents where I am empowered to say no to the child when it asks for soda, and have the power to limit the amount of time the child can spend with the TV or their tablet. The thing that motivates me to pursue child related work is simple, I love spending time with them and seeing the difference I can make in their young lives and in turn the lives of their parents. I believe that the children are the future and if even one of the children’s lives I’ve touched so far remembers any of the lessons I taught them during my time with them then I consider all the goals that I have for my career to have been accomplished. If some of the time I’ve spent with them helps improve their lives in the long run then I know for sure that I have done my job correctly and to the best of my ability.