What is it Worth?

I have been spending the past few days working, which is my one and only excuse for not blogging since like last week. No, I don't have an official job, I've been doing a lot of babysitting for other families.

Tuesday, babysitting Tori and Megan from down the road, I had a lot of fun! It was 7:35am when I started walking over to their house. By 7:55am, Jennifer left for job training and her first day of real official work. At around 8:30 is when it hit me that I had about 6 hours of entertaining girls to do. I brought my sister along, which helped a lot, but it was still a lot of on my feet and having fun. After lunch, I did the dishes (which I heard from my mom was a nice touch), and I got to thinking...

What is time worth?

I mean, no mother of two who is getting the second job in the house is going to start paying babysitters minimum wage to watch her girls...that's ridiculous! I ended up getting paid just over $4 an hour, which outside of the babysitting force is slave labor. But it was the most I'd gotten paid in a long time. After my babysitting job (which I got home from around 3:00pm), I had to shower and get dressed for a bonfire at my friend's house. We were celebrating moving on from high school and going to college.

Well, one semester is worth upwards of $10,000 some places. So, what? 4 months? Averaging $2,500 a month? That's around $83 a day. That's some nice money, considering most people only actually attend about 6 hours of classes a day. At most, that puts us at paying $13 an hour for education. Interesting, idea.

Then, on Wednesday, I spent a few hours watching two of my best friends here in Indiana, Rachel and Becca. They are totally sweet and fun and exciting. And also both under the age of 4, which put me at a younger age group mind set than the day before. There I was paid about $3.50 an hour. Which isn't me comparing at all or talking money (because people don't like me doing that), but I will say this:

Child care is worth somewhere in the vicinity of $4 per hour, an education is worth about $13 an hour (or less), and burger flipping is worth about $8 an hour. How is it our mindless jobs are worth twice as much as being a caring person in a child's life? And how is it we allow people to charge us $13 an hour to read to us our text books and make sure we are doing what we are supposed to?  It's almost the same job, requires almost the same amount of energy, and requires knowledge of a specific subject.

I consider myself a cheap college proffessor for children now. And I'm also about to head to an interview at Subway, where I will be paid more per hour than I would for my teaching and learning postion as a babysitter.

So what is time worth exactly? And how do you make your time worth more? Something tells me there is no way to put an exact measure on how much time is worth.

Maybe it's worth about one blog post an hour once a week... Quite the job upkeep, really. ;)