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atypical parent situations

Should You Wake Your Au Pair When You Leave For Work REALLY Early?

by cv harquail February 19, 2012

Hi AuPairMom, We are welcoming our first au pair in about 3 weeks, and we are very excited. Your blog really helped us decide that this was the right type of child care for our family. We need someone with scheduling flexibility, because we have an always-changing, somewhat odd work week. I have to leave [...]

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What the best way to Pre-Match with an Au Pair, before connecting to an Agency?

by cv harquail September 1, 2011

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could meet a really terrific young person from anther country, discover that you had complementary world views, and THEN go through an official agency to engage him or her as an au pair? From time to time, we get questions from either parents or potential au pairs about how [...]

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How can we prepare our Au Pair for significant disruption?

by cv harquail January 4, 2011

Life brings us wave after wave of change. To move forward, we have to adapt to changes that happen to us and to changes that we make ourselves. And, as parents, we have to help our families anticipate and adapt to the changes we see coming, and to all the surprises we’re not quite able [...]

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My Future Host Mom’s Sister is Creeping Me Out

by cv harquail November 28, 2010

Okay, “creeping me out” is clearly an American idiom that I have supplied as a headline, but that phrase seems to capture the dynamic going on for this cautious au pair. She’s matched with a family, and getting to know them through emails, etc. before she joins the family in a few months. The family [...]

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We’re moving, and must rematch. How soon do we tell our au pair?

by cv harquail September 23, 2010

We have a wonderful au pair who has been living with us for 2 months. Unfortunately, due to a family medical emergency, we need to relocate to the other coast within the next 6 weeks. We will not be able to take our au pair with us so she will need to rematch. We want [...]

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My Potential Host Parents Might Be Divorcing. Should I ‘unmatch’?

by cv harquail September 14, 2010

Dear Au Pair Mom, For the past couple of months, I had been looking for an Au Pair job in Europe (I am American), and finally found a great family via Aupair.com. I used your advice and evaluated the match by shared values, lifestyle, and mutual expectations. We seemed like a perfect fit, and everything [...]

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Doubling Up on Au Pairs: Two Times the Challenge

by cv harquail June 27, 2010

I’ve been hoping to get the host moms who have two au pairs at a time to write guest posts for us explaining how they make this work for them. It’s hard to find the energy and mind space to write reflectively about your au pair experiences… so believe me I understand the gap between [...]

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Matching with an Au Pair: How much info to share about an Atypical Host Parent Situation

by cv harquail June 14, 2010

Today’s Truth: Some of us are typical host parents, some of us are atypical host parents, and all of us are trying to be better host parents. I’ve been wanting to write about atypical parenting situations for a while now, but a conversation over the weekend has raised a particular situation where we can consider [...]

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