Hypo-Hypochondriac

The woman who watches my children is a totally out of control hypochondriac. I had suspected this for some time, but since she has been watching my kids before and/or after school it had become horribly apparent that there is a serious problem here. I wonder if it even may eclipse hypochondria and border on Munchausen's (sp?) syndrome (the syndrome where the Mother actually hurts her child to get some sort of attention from the medical community).

This is very hard to deal with for me. My kids rarely even take any kind of medication and I am allergic to almost everything. Seriously, I can't even take Ibuprofen. So when her children came over to spend the night, imagine my surprise when, and I am not making this up, she had 3 gallon sized ziploc bags full of medication for her daughters to take that evening. THREE ZIPLOC BAGS - GALLON SIZED! She went through the whole explanation of the medications, who it was for, how much to give, which ones to rinse the mouth out after taking, the order of application.....for Christ's sake- I needed a PHD to remember it all. I was seriously tempted to nod and pretend I understood and give the poor kids a break for the night. But on the off chance that they would die without one of the meds, I had her write down the instructions and proceeded to overmedicate her children that evening.

I felt sorry for the kids. They lined up and inhaled, swallowed and chewed (chod? ) dutifully as if it was the most normal thing in the world. The worst part was seeing my kids watch the whole scenario with their huge brown eyes giving away their fervent wish that they had all of that cool stuff, too. Remember being younger and fanagling the paper clip into a "retainer" so you could look like everyone else in 6th grade? That is what I saw in their eyes. (Maybe that whole retainer thing was just me.......)

Now I am at an impasse. I don't really want my kids spending much time in a house where sickness is considered normal and even romanticized. HOWEVER, I work the weirdest hours and this is my 3rd babysitter in the course of 8 months. It is not often that you find someone willing to have you drop your children off at 3 am, get them up in the morning, feed them and get them off to school. I honestly have no idea who else would do it (that I would trust). Plus, I don't have to pay her, just clean her house. And let me just say at this point, she is not only a hypochondriac, but also a pig. I have never seen dust like that in my entire life. If I wasn't cleaning her house once a week, I would not let my kids go there because of the filth. No wonder her kids are plagued with asthma and allergy problems.

You would think that raising my children away from radical pill-popping babysitters and in a clean environment would be important enough to stay at home and raise my kids myself. Alas, it is not to be. In our fantastic money driven society, it is much more important to go to work at a $10 per hour job which barely keeps food on the table and a roof over our heads. God forbid that I contribute to society by raising great (non-pill popping, relatively clean) kids. I don't know how to go about this, since I don't really believe in welfare (for me). I just wish I got a salary (hourly pay would just be being greedy) for being a Mom. Sigh.......