Introductions of a Lew

Since I scraped all the old writings from my blog to start anew, the introduction article also got scraped with it. So here is a new piece talking a bit about little ol’ me.


I work and manage two preschools with a total child count of 70+ kids and a staff of about a dozen ladies. The age range of our children is 18 months to 6 years old.  The age range of our ladies is..........well, never mind.

I am sometimes asked how I got into childcare as a profession. Some say, “Oh, have you always liked working with children.” Um, not so much.

The truth of the matter is, none of the career paths I chose seemed to pan out. Plus, being married to a gal who ran one school (then we opened a second a few years ago), I just began to help out over the years more and more.

Eventually, as the other things I was doing began to fall away, and we opened the second school I became an official “Kindergarten Cop.”

As a young man I started washing dishes at 14, then worked in retail for about 5 years (K-Mart, Big Bear Supermarket, Sav-On / Osco). I did a stint in the Sony factory for about a year. I did some work as a security guard for a few years.  Worked at a storage facility for a while. 

But the bulk of my work history involved working in hotels and restaurants.

When Mrs. Babblings and I began dating, I was working as a bartender and room service waiter at the Del Mar Hilton. I was tired of the whole restaurant scene, and ready for something new. But I also hated to throw away nearly 15 years of my work history.

Well, a few months back, some corporate spies for Hilton had come through the hotel. The industry term for them was “spotters”. They pretend to be customers then write reports for the higher-ups. I remember saying to Mj, “I wonder who does that type of work for little independent places. It seems a fellow could start a company and do ‘secret shopping’ for smaller outfits.”

So as I was suffering from restaurant burn-out, one day the little lady suggested maybe I leave the industry as a regular employee and try to start my own business doing the secret shopper thing we had talked about a few months back. Since she was the major bread-winner in our household, we concluded that we wouldn’t go broke if my little room service income stopped coming in.

And that is how LB Spotter Services was born. I did that for nine years. Never made a huge amount of money, but we went to some fun places. Catalina, Palm Springs, Primm Nevada, and Westlake Village, just to name a few.

I also did stand-up comedy for a couple of years during that period. And while being on stage is certainly a rush, writing is my true passion.

After phasing out of the Spotter business and stand-up, I got into Real Estate, both as a Realtor and buying properties for the empire of the Babbler’s Wife and myself. Yeah, that worked out well.

So these days I do side work as a Notary and am the administrator of the smaller of our two schools.

These past few years have been challenging, as they have for us all. But for the most part, life’s been good to me, so far (as Joe Walsh once said in a song).

Even though this piece wasn’t funny, per se, I hope you got something out of it. If nothing else, perhaps new readers now know a bit more about me.

Lew B.