From the category archives:

Caring for children

Our Au Pair is not the cheerful girl we expected. Now what?

by cv harquail February 15, 2010

We’re 1 month into our first au pair and not sure if it’s going to be ok or not. Just to clarify we’re based outside the US so our au pair has not come to us through an agency, in fact she is American.
We have 3 kids, all under 6 and there is no language [...]

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Extra Hours: What’s fair pay when you break this taboo?

by cv harquail February 13, 2010

Many parents find that 45 hours a week is not enough childcare.
Either you have an emergency late night at work, a kid home sick, a snow day, or a bookclub meeting. Some parents have work + commute combos that mean they’re away from home 10 hours a day, m-f, even if they stagger their departures [...]

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Au Pair Abruptly Quits, then wants to come back to see kids. Really? (poll)

by cv harquail January 28, 2010

Here’s a painful situation, about which this host mom could use some good advice. I’m sure that this kind of situation has happened to other families who’ve gone into rematch [Something similar happened to us with our flame-out au pair, and so reading this mom's email got me all mad all over again. What went [...]

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Protect Your Au Pair’s Off-Duty Time

by cv harquail January 11, 2010

Au Pairs work hard. When they are off duty, they need their downtime.
But, if they’re good au pairs, your kids probably like them and enjoy spending time interacting with them. Kids don’t always know the difference between on-duty and off-duty, so it’s our job as host parents to help au pairs protect their downtime.
This isn’t [...]

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Beyond the Chauffer: Benefits of Au Pairs when your kids are teens

by cv harquail November 3, 2009

Au Pairs can be great companions and caregivers to older children…. and by older, I’m thinking teens.
Yeah, yeah, teens think they are old enough to do without childcare — they can be at home by themselves, cook their own meals, get their homework done, and walk around with earbuds blocking out the rest of the [...]

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My Au Pair Won’t Get a Flu Shot … and we have an Infant. Now what?

by cv harquail October 15, 2009

There are several situations where getting a flu vaccine is a MUST– and one of those is if you care for a child under 6 months old. These littlest ones are uniquely vulnerable to both the regular flu and the H1N1 virus– because they are too young to be vaccinated themselves.
Adults who care for and/ [...]

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Flu Shots for Your Au Pair: Polls

by cv harquail October 15, 2009

Let’s “take the temperature” of the AuPairMom community… and see what’s happening in your home about the flu vaccine and the H1N1 vaccine…

3 Reasons to Take Your Au Pair for a Flu Shot (AuPairMom.com)

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3 Reasons to Take Your Au Pair for a Flu Shot

by cv harquail October 14, 2009

We’re talking regular flu here, the annual kind, the kind that killed over 24,000 people in the US last winter. [ H1N1 coming up in the next post.] Sure, lots of the people who died were already weak from other illnesses. But many who died were healthy until they got influenza.

You don’t have to die [...]

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Share the Cream: Give your AP meaningful work to do

by cv harquail September 28, 2009

One piece of advice my friend Adelaide gave me when we got our first au pair was “Share the Cream.”
“Sharing the Cream” means sharing both the good parts (the cream) as well as the tough parts of a job or an experience.

I don’t know where Adelaide came up with this saying, but it’s stuck with [...]

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Have a 9-11 Plan

by cv harquail September 11, 2009

Thinking about ‘lessons’ from 9-11 can often be heartbreaking, especially in my community where so many of us lost family, friends and co-workers in the WTC attacks. It’s almost disrespectful to bring up the idea of a “9-11″ plan, but maybe thinking ahead about how we might respond to a similar event is useful and [...]

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