Need a New Year’s Eve Sitter? Forget It

Lisa Sam is a freshman at New York’s Hunter College with an interest in anthropology. Usually she also has an interest in cash, but when a desperate Brooklyn baby-sitting client offered her $300 to watch two children on this once-in-a-millennium New Year’s Eve, Sam turned her down.

“I told them I’d be available at any other time, but I’m going to hang out New Year’s with some friends,” she said. “My mom thought I was nuts.”

Not everyone is looking for a New Year’s Eve sitter. Some parents figured they would never find one, at least not one they could afford. And some people, particularly those in computer-dependent jobs, must work that night in case the Y2K computer bug surfaces and confuses the year 2000 with 1900.

Others want to mark the occasion with family or are reluctant to leave the kids with a sitter just in case computer glitches disrupt light, heat or other basic services.

But for those who want to leave the kids with a sitter until after midnight, good luck!

Rep. Constance A. Morella (R-Md.) has spent the last three years leading a congressional panel overseeing federal readiness for the computer bug, worrying about everything from airplane safety to elevators in public housing.

But she failed to foresee the dearth of New Year’s Eve sitters. And this has radically altered her plans for the start of the millennium. She and her husband will stay home with four of their 16 grandchildren because the kids’ parents failed to find suitable help.

“My husband says maybe we should do this every year instead of all the parties,” said Morella.

Not all grandparents are so accommodating. Molly and Jim Reynolds of West Hartford, Conn., always give a New Year’s Eve party. They had always left their two kids, now 6 and 8, with Molly’s parents two blocks away. But this year the grandparents are throwing their own party, a costume affair for eight couples who have been asked to dress as the most influential people of the 20th century.

“They wanted to do something special, and we don’t blame them,” said Reynolds, who will stick to her own party plans and somehow manage to watch the kids too.

Barrington, Ill., real estate agent Elizabeth Sincox looked and looked for a sitter for her children, who are 4 and 6. But even her own niece was too expensive, so Sincox came up with a creative alternative.

“We’re going to invite friends and neighbors over to our home and set the clocks ahead so that ‘midnight’ is really 9 p.m. We’ll bang pots and go wild with the kids, but the party will be over by 9:30,” she said. After everyone is gone and the kids are in bed, she and her husband plan to sip champagne together quietly on the couch.

Unable to find a sitter on their own, many families are turning to agencies. But even they are not a sure bet this year. New York’s “Pinch Sitters” is not even booking for New Year’s Eve, although it has done so in other years. “I just don’t want to get involved in it,” said Kathleen Lewis, who runs the agency.

Besides, she added, work is not how she intends to usher in the new millennium.