Elizabeth Brown

I am twenty-three years old, and I think by now I’m supposed to be an utterly serious adult. I am not an utterly serious adult, but I’m working on it. 

I worked for three years as a nanny for two adorable children, whom I call Kai and Amélie on this blog. Sometimes I think being a nanny makes it impossible for me to be totally grown-up, or completely childlike for that matter. I’m caught in maturity limbo, where I have to know how to mend scraped knees and monitor television time and discipline kids when they don’t listen and be punctual; and yet my nanny popularity rating depends on my ability to build a fort of blankets and do all the voices when I read books and appreciate glitter glue and puns. Finding balance isn’t impossible, but it’s no piece of cake either.

Amélie once pointed out that because I’m a grown-up, I’m supposed to know everything. There are a lot of problems with this statement, perhaps most important of which is that until I turned twenty-two, Kai and Amélie used to tack -teen onto the end of whatever age I was. Twenty-teen, twenty-one-teen, maybe finding it easier to justify our friendship in believing that I was still sort of a kid like them. But now, according to Amélie, one day in December I went from being a normal twenty-one-teen-year-old to being a “grown-up girl” who is “supposed to know everything.” When I told Amélie that I don’t know everything, what I meant was that grown-ups in general don’t know everything. I thought maybe she’d welcome this news; after all, what kid doesn’t love hearing that there’s still room to question grown-ups? Instead she just said, “But you’re supposed to, right?” 

Besides taking care of other people’s children, I love to cook and bake. I also like to work on do-it-yourself (DIY) projects like making or altering my own clothes, knitting, painting, and refurbishing things I find at garage sales or the thrift store. I like reading fashion blogs and magazines and taking pictures of my outfits. 

After studying language at DePaul University in Chicago and the Université de Bordeaux in France, I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in French from Kent State University. I live in Columbus, Ohio where I work as a restaurant manager. I still dream of a job where I can cook or bake or write about cooking or baking (or eating, for that matter). But not until after I’ve been to Napa and gotten my hands toughened up by some vines.

I suspect my nannying days aren’t behind me, either.