A huge recommendation for Rose!
I went back to work earlier than expected and our childminder didn’t have space for another few months so at short notice we needed to find someone flexible who could look after our daughter 2-3 days a week for the next 3 months. As I was going back to work for first time, it was not only a practical arrangement, also felt very emotional with a lot of worry about leaving our daughter (and first baby) for the first time. Thank goodness we found Rose. I had an initial chat about what the plan was, and candidly what we were anxious about, and Rose set us at ease. She was clearly experienced with babies ours’s age, as well as older/younger. She has a policy we loved of going out twice a day no matter the weather, so she would get plenty of fresh air and park time. And was very happy working with the schedule we were working to, and to feedback on whether she thought it need tweaking/amending as our daughter grew.
We had a couple of settling in afternoons before Rose started properly, and this also helped us feel totally re-assured our daughter was in the safest of hands. Rose is absolutely baby-focussed, giving them her full attention and always responding to how they are feeling and what they need. She is inventive, finding baby groups we didn’t even know about locally, as well as taking her to some of her(/our) favourites. She was always keen to learn – we told her we’d been doing ‘sing and sign’, and our daughter loved the songs and actions, and she was keen to go and see it for herself and learn the actions.
(There were many magic moments that stood out from her time with us – one being the impossible. We have stairs almost everywhere in our place, and had decided not to put stairgates in, hoping to teach our daughter from the earliest point to be careful when climbing. As Rose took her on, she was at the stage of climbing stairs, but not yet having any idea of how to go down them. Within one day, Rose had (somehow) taught her to crawl up to the stairs, turn around and go down backwards. Absolutely amazing. And still makes us laugh at how carefully she turns and gently goes down them)