Until she was about 18, we referred to Mia as \u201cNatasha\u201d to all but family. That was so no one might find out who she really was and make use of her services as babysitter extraordinaire. Life is tough for parents of young children. We do what we can to secure babysitting, even if it means not telling our best friends who is taking care of our child while we dine with them. In the end, it didn\u2019t work. I have at least four friends who used her for babysitting (you know who you are!). I did it grudgingly and referred to such incidents to Mia as \u201ccheating\u201d on Seth.<\/p>\n
Mia came to us when Seth was about seven months old. She was 14, and from the start was a natural with him. She took to her task easily and was able to help Seth (and us) throughout his childhood. Since Seth is mildly autistic, her ability to amuse, teach, and guide him while still a teenager was no mean feat. Now, she\u2019s all grown up, teaching kindergarten at Margaret Mead Elementary in the Lake Washington School District. We were hoping she\u2019d end up at Seth\u2019s school. Actually, I was kind of hoping she\u2019d drop out of high school and move in with us. But that never happened. And if I\u2019m honest, I really didn\u2019t want that for her.<\/p>\n
Despite her many, many strengths \u2013 brains, beauty, wit among them \u2013 Mia has a glaring weakness: she can\u2019t cook. Luckily for her, I can, and I promised her I\u2019d teach her. So this is Mia\u2019s online cooking school where I hope to teach her the basics of how to cook great-tasting food without a lot of effort.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Until she was about 18, we referred to Mia as \u201cNatasha\u201d to all but family. That was so no one might find out who she really was and make use of her services as babysitter extraordinaire. Life is tough for parents of young children. We do what we can to secure babysitting, even if it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[111],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-intro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}