Baby Sitters

FRANCIS SCOTT Key Medical Center is doing its part to help parents find qualified baby sitters. It's also helping those sitters feel comfortable about the jobs they've taken.This win-win situation is a new course for young baby sitters, called Safe Sitter, offered for the first time in Maryland at the Key Medical Center on Eastern Avenue. Nurses, doctors and other professionals from the hospital's pediatrics department teach the course designed to help youngsters 11 to 14 cope withhealth and safety problems that might arise while they are taking care of youngsters.

A Loganville, Pa. woman said she did not leave her babies alone while she drove to Glen Rock to do laundry. “I left them with a baby sitter,” said Kayla Ann Rafferty, 23, of the Midway Motel on Main Street. “I never, ever leave the babies alone.” State police said they found Rafferty's 2-month-old and 1-year-old daughters alone in the motel room after receiving a report of children crying there. A caseworker from the county's Office of Children, Youth and Families took emergency custody of the babies, police said.

Priscilla Ireys will loan friends money. She'll rescue them when their cars break down. Heck, she'll even feed their pets when they're away. Just don't ask her for her baby sitter's phone number -- especially around New Year's Eve."You love your friends, but you won't give that up," says the 40-year-old mother of three.And with good reason. Dec. 31 is considered prime time for baby sitters, an evening when they get to call the shots and party-going parents respond by promising everything from doubled salaries to gourmet snacks.

Baltimore police are looking for 7-month-old Ki'Yauhn Birch and 16-year-old Jonae Boozer, who have not been seen since Friday evening. Birch was left in Boozer's care, police said, and neither of the child's parents have been able to locate them since. They were last seen in the 1100 block of Lyndhurst St., police said. Authorities believe Boozer may be in the Prince George's or Montgomery County area. Boozer is a black female, about 155 pounds and 5-feet, 4-inches tall, according to police, has a blond mohawk hairstyle and piercings in her lips, nose and eyebrow.

It's a busy weekend for holiday parties, and somebody else has already hired your favorite baby sitter, your second favorite, your third through fifth choices, and that friend of a friend of a friend. Will you and your spouse be stuck at home with a video? Or will you go online, type your ZIP code into one of a growing number of baby-sitting Web sites, find an available candidate and make the social scene at the last minute? The Internet has become the latest place for parents and baby sitters to meet.

A half-dozen seventh-grade girls at Pine Grove Middle School in Carney are sitting around talking and quickly discover they have something in common: A sudden burst of popularity among families with young children.Five have been recruited to baby-sit on what could be the biggest party night of their lives, New Year's Eve on the cusp of 2000.Most received their offers by mid-October -- and from more than one family.Three expect to earn at least $50 for a few hour's work.But the winner, the girls quickly conclude, is 12-year-old Nicole Benham of Perry Hall.

Many parents who enjoy traveling pursue one of three strategies when they hit the road: leave the kids with a willing relative, take a nanny along or plan a vacation at a child-friendly resort. But sometimes none of these is an option, so to get at least one dinner out by themselves, Mom and Dad need to find a baby sitter in an unfamiliar locale. For those who find themselves in this situation, the ease of finding child care depends on a number of variables -- as does the range of the services available.

Baby-sitting used to be something teen-agers naturally grew into. You turned 13 or 14, you baby-sat for a neighbor, nothing happened, you got paid. End of story.But changing times -- with more safety risks and working mothers requiring baby sitters for longer periods -- have so complicated things that JoAnn Wedemeyer, a pediatric educator at North Arundel Hospital, felt coaching was needed.Last year, Wedemeyer started a baby-sitting class at the hospital to better prepare parents and teens.

IN SEPTEMBER, Resurrection Schoolfourth-grade teacher Rosemary Warwick challenged her math class to enter a contest given in the Scholastic publication DynaMath magazine.Christine Burns, a fan of the Baby-Sitters Club book series, chose to enter the contest in which the baby sitters run a children's camp but don't earn any money. Contestants had to use math to help figure out why the camp didn't make money.Resourceful Christine spotted some expenses the baby sitters hadn't figured in their budget, researched the costs in Ellicott City and wrote an essay to explain her analysis.

The trick to surviving as a working parent is to think creatively when it comes to child care. Several of you wrote this week to share your solutions to the endless summer/bored-children/worried-parent syndrome."

After reading your article ("Maryland task force recommends banning crib bumpers," May 20) on Maryland possibly banning the crib bumpers, I definitely find myself on the side of banning them. Granted, I'm only a teenage babysitter, and I won't have the responsibility of a child for many, many years, but I had never even thought that there were "dangers of bruising" or any other type of reason to install the bumpers in the first place. I agree with the members of the task force that say babies can't exert the force to hit their head on a side of the crib hard enough to bruise.

Anne Arundel County police were investigating the death last night of a 6-month-old girl whose body was discovered at her baby sitter's house. Police were called about 8:30 p.m. to a home in the 1600 block of Cananaro Drive in Annapolis, where they found Alexis Michelle LaPinto dead in a bedroom. Police detectives questioned the baby's mother, Denise LaPinto, and witnesses, including the baby sitter, whose name they did not release. They also were awaiting a report by the medical examiner's office on the cause of death.

It's a busy weekend for holiday parties, and somebody else has already hired your favorite baby sitter, your second favorite, your third through fifth choices, and that friend of a friend of a friend. Will you and your spouse be stuck at home with a video? Or will you go online, type your ZIP code into one of a growing number of baby-sitting Web sites, find an available candidate and make the social scene at the last minute? The Internet has become the latest place for parents and baby sitters to meet.

Many parents who enjoy traveling pursue one of three strategies when they hit the road: leave the kids with a willing relative, take a nanny along or plan a vacation at a child-friendly resort. But sometimes none of these is an option, so to get at least one dinner out by themselves, Mom and Dad need to find a baby sitter in an unfamiliar locale. For those who find themselves in this situation, the ease of finding child care depends on a number of variables -- as does the range of the services available.

A Reisterstown man known as "Uncle Larry" by neighborhood children has been accused of sexually assaulting two of the 6-year-olds he frequently baby-sat, leaving parents in the neighborhood visibly upset by the news. Larry E. Davis, 51, who lives with relatives in the 12300 block of Boncrest Drive, was arrested by Baltimore County police Wednesday on two counts each of child abuse and third-degree sex offense charges. Police said he molested a 6-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl at different times between June and earlier this month.

At the height of their affair, Paul Stephen Riggins would periodically call his longtime lover the familys teen-age baby sitter to tell her that his wife had left him. But it was a lie. Whenever the baby sitter called Nancy Riggins at work at the Burtonsville Giant store later in the day, she was always there. So when Nancy Riggins turned up missing, her 5-year-old daughter apparently left alone in the Riggins Elkridge house July 2, 1996, the sitter was worried. I knew something was wrong because I knew Nancy would never have left on her own accord and left Amanda in the house, the former baby sitter testified yesterday in Howard County Circuit Court on the fifth full day of testimony in Stephen Riggins murder trial.

LOS ANGELES -- The movie's over and you need a cab home. You'd like to have dinner after the show but don't know where to go. Your toddler didn't enjoy the film as much as you'd hoped.You can handle these minor-league moviegoing dilemmas yourself, but at four Pacific Theatres multiplexes in Southern California, somebody's being paid to do it for you.Under a Patron Assistance Program introduced at Pacific's Northridge Cinemas three months ago, a "patron assistance coordinator" is available to help with everything from information on show times and taxi services to ATM locations and restaurant reservations.

Washington. -- Just when everyone had finished poking through the carry-on baggage the baby boomers were bringing to Washington, just when we exhausted the subjects of the draft, sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, along comes an extra steamer trunk full of generational issues. This one is labeled child care.On Tuesday, the first mother of a pre-school child ever nominated to the Cabinet came up to Capitol Hill for hearings. And for the first time in American history, the central ethical question about her confirmation was child care.

A few days after he reported his wife missing, Paul Stephen Riggins asked his girlfriend - the family's teen-age baby sitter - to marry him and gave her his wife's ring, a Howard County police investigator testified yesterday. That moment was recounted by police Lt. Greg Marshall during the second full day of testimony in the Riggins murder trial as defense attorneys tried to chip away at the prosecution's case and at the credibility of its witnesses. Stephen Riggins, 43, is being tried in Howard County Circuit Court on a charge of first-degree murder in the disappearance July 1996 of his wife, Nancy Lee Riggins.

Police have reunited a 9-year-old girl with her biological mother and arrested a former Harford County woman on charges that she used an elaborate forgery scheme to abduct the girl. Yesterday, Donna L. Snyder said her daughter, Caitlyn Crowther, is in good health and glad to be home after months of separation. Snyder lashed out at the judicial system, which she believes is responsible for the abduction. "How can a grandparent have a hard time getting custody of a grandchild, but a complete stranger can get custody of someone's child?"