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We did when they were younger and we all only had one, but now the idea of having 4 kids under the age of 4 at one time is too much. Plus bedtimes/naps not at home are so tricky. But I definitely will send my older LO on playdates/take older LOs of my friends when we need to get things done. I assume as my kids get older, it will be easier. But my parents are really helpful, so I haven't tried very hard to make anything work.

I have a little but probably could more. One issue is that my closest friend's son and my daughter don't always play that well together and it can be pretty tiring! Plus differing schedules.

We have done date nights where one parent comes over after bedtime and one couple goes out on a date. Then it should be really easy (except that both times we did that my lo didn't sleep well).

We do, for now, although with a second LO on the way we will probably have to start paying a sitter.

No. I feel like our kids are maybe a bit young? Like it is still hard to feed my daughter at 21 months. And she needs to be at her own house to sleep. So leaving her at anyone's house would still be hard for more than maybe 2 hours or so and that hardly seems worth it. When they are all older though I hope we will!

We moved last year so we had to meet all new people but we still do this a bit. Not for date nights but we'll trade occasionally for appointments or getting chores done, it's worked well.

@Truth Bombs: Yes and I think its genius! My BFF and I often swap for grocery shopping, nail appts or going to the gym. It works well for the other reasons mentioned above. Esp because its way easier for kids to entertain each other than for you to have to entertain them.

Not really, we don't live super close and there aren't really a ton of occasions we need babysitting.

No. We've talked about it but never have actually done it. We rarely go out and if we do we ask a family member to watch him.

We probably will when LO is older but at this age she goes to bed so early that it doesn't work well at this point. She spends the night with grandparents for date nights.

I wish!! I guess I don't have enough close friends with babies the same age. But now we are closer to family I don't think we will really ever need to do this. Plus we don't go out that much - haha.

I am working on setting this up right now! We've kind of done it for a few hours at a time but my focus is now on school vacations/closings so we don't all have to take full pto to cover these days.

I like the idea, but we don't do it. The only family I would really consider swapping with already has a nanny, so they don't really need it.

My son is not quite two. I feel like this will be a more manageable strategy when he is more independent, like five. There are too many individual issues with other people's two-year-olds. I don't want to deal with diapers, naps, eating issues, safety issues and mess times two. That sounds horrible to be honest.

We haven't done it very much, but we should do it more. I think our reasons for now doing it have already been said: we don't want to burden other people; some of my friends have local family so there is no pressing need to have an exchange; and kids with differing schedules. Also we live in a big city and most of my friends don't have cars and don't live close by adding an extra layer of logistics to deal with.

That said, we could probably do this more.

Not yet, but we have become friendly with some neighbors who said they are interested in babysitting-swapping, so I'm working to build that relationship so we can start doing that.

I thought we might - we used to offer to babysit for our friends fairly often when they had kids and we didn't and sort of assumed that once we had kids that would continue and we'd go back and forth. But they've never once offered to take B in the 2 years since he was born, which....yeah, annoys me.

Our neighbours have a son a week older than B and they're best friends and every so often I offer to take him and let them have a break but they seem reluctant, they always say that it would be too much work for us (their son is really high energy).

My parents aren't too far away (well, they're 3 hours away but they come down fairly often) so we don't really need a swap, it would just be nice to have somebody local. Maybe once B is a bit bigger.