I haven't blogged in forever, but today I'm having a really crummy day.

At our church, we have a group of paid sitters that we use for childcare for various church functions. I'm in charge of scheduling these people when they are needed. We have one older woman, a grandmotherly or even great-grandmotherly type lady, who has been my go-to sitter for the last couple of years. She has been Alison's sitter on the Sunday nights when Kevin and I are working with the middle school youth group since Alison was about 18 months old. Today I called her to see if she would be available for a sitting job on Monday morning, and found out that she is having some medical problems, which could be quite serious. She was going to call me tomorrow to tell me about it, because she won't be able to do childcare for the near future. I felt so bad for causing her to have to tell me about it before she was ready to. I've been crying all morning because she is such a wonderful person and I don't want her to be sick. She's, obviously, very upset, and not just because of the possibly serious medical problems. She truly loves taking care of these kids and is upset at the thought of not being able to do it anymore.

I'm stressing out trying to figure out how I'm going to cover all the babysitting jobs that she was set up for, especially since there are jobs that I was having trouble staffing before this. The Associate Director of Children's Ministries, who I work with on childcare, is currently in Liberia and will be there until the end of the month. I talked to her counterpart to get some help today, which was hard because I needed to tell her that there was a problem, but it's not my place to tell the details. I didn't know what to say when she asked if I thought L could use a ministerial call or visit. She knows L well enough to know that it's a physical problem, because that's about all that would keep her from watching these kids.

And then there's the whole issue of what, if anything, to tell Alison. For right now, I don't think I need to tell her anything, but we'll probably have to in a few weeks. I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.