Free You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny by Suzanne Hansen

and asked to live off the property. Carmen owned a home, she had a boyfriend, and she wanted to spend time with her family. In short, she wanted a life. But Michael wouldn’t hear of it. He only allowed her to stay at her own house two nights a week, on her days off. Her high salary kept her in golden handcuffs. Carmen told me she would never be paid as well anywhere else, and she said that Michael’s vindictiveness was well-known. She was convinced that if she left, she would be sent on her way without a reference and would have a hard time finding another job. I figured she was exaggerating. She had to be. They had stolen her right out of Neil Diamond’s kitchen, hadn’t they?
    I felt pretty homesick by the end of my first week. One night I opened the drawer beside my bed and pulled out the journal that Kristi’s parents had given me as a graduation present. “Wishes and Dreams” was scrawled across the cover in flowery script. I opened it up and reread the inscription:
    Suzy—
May all your thoughts be happy ones, and all your experiences milestones. We love you
.
—George and MaryAnn
     
    I was suddenly aware of the enormous distance between me and the people who loved me and had watched me grow up. Here in Hollywood, I was an unknown. Sure, I was making some friends—Carmen, Delma, Sarah—but I was still lonely. It seemed the perfect time to christen my present and start recording my new life. Over the course of my stay in Hollywood, I would turn to this book almost nightly to pour out my decidedly mixed bag of thoughts and experiences.
    I’ve been here a week now, and I’m just getting to know everyone, but it’s kinda lonely. I miss my friends, my sisters, my mom and dad. I still really miss Ryan. Trying not to. Trying not to. Every day is the same basic routine. Well, not exactly. In order to have a beginning you have to have an end. I don’t think my day has an end. Here’s how it usually goes:
     
Rise before 7:00 with Brandon, feed him, help Carmen or Delma fix the kids breakfast.
Help get Amanda and Joshua dressed for school.
Carmen packs lunches; intervene in the inevitable debate over its contents with Joshua.
Help get the kids ready for Judy to take to school.
Care for and entertain Brandon until Amanda comes home at 12:30 from preschool, and Josh at 3:30 from kindergarten.
Read with all the kids, play with toys, or succumb to the lure of the VCR. God bless
Cinderella
.
Eat dinner with Judy and the kids.
Get Brandon ready for bed, help the other two with a bath and pajamas.
Read to them. (Sometimes Judy reads to them.)
Feed Brandon his bottle, rock him, and put him in his crib.
Fill two bottles for Brandon, put them on ice, and bring them to my room. Take infant monitor to my room and listen for him to wake up.
When he cries, traipse down the hall where there is not, thank God, a red beam of light from the elaborate alarm. Rock him while warming the bottle. At the precise moment he sucks down the last drop, remove the bottle and simultaneously slip the pacifier into his mouth.
Repeat the bottle ritual a couple of hours later.
Then it’s morning, and I start all over again.
     
    And I did not know that getting up with the baby in the middle of the night was part of my job description. I should have asked about that, instead of my idiotic spanking question! Nanny school never covered how to handle sleep deprivation on the job—I could sure use some pointers on how to get by with less than six hours of shut-eye.
     
    In fact, I was probably wasting precious beauty sleep writing.

When you have children you have to step outside yourself.
—Madonna
     

chapter 5
dazed and confused
     
    It wasn’t long before I started to feel more at ease, thanks to Carmen and Delma and the rest of the staff. They clued me in to the complex workings of the house, and showed me which goofs you could laugh about and which mistakes were cause for alarm. As I grew closer to them, they told me often what a great job I