From the category archives:

Random Advice

Working Mom Realities at TheMamaBee

by cv harquail May 14, 2010

For the small segment of the world who uses Twitter, Fridays are special days, full of treats.
#FollowFriday (or #ff, for short) is a day when folks will tweet to recommend someone to follow… and it’s a great way to discover new resources and find new voices.

Since most AuPairMom readers, like most Americans, aren’t using Twitter, [...]

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Realizing you aren’t ready to be Au Pair host parents? And you have an Au Pair?

by cv harquail May 12, 2010

If we only knew then what we know now… being an Au Pair Host Parent would be really easy. Okay, easier.
As our au pair parenting experiences unfold, we learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t, what we can change and what we can’t, how we can accommodate to an au pair and when [...]

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Extending Legally, Without an Agency: Ideas?

by cv harquail April 25, 2010

We would like advice on how to extend with out au pair legally, but by using a lawyer instead of going through our current agency.
We want to disconnect from our agency, gently.
To put it mildly, our experience with our agency & LCC has been a great disappointment. They are the only agency that serves our [...]

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When Your Au Pair Breaks Your Psychological Contract

by cv harquail April 24, 2010

[ Note: I think this might be the longest AuPairMom post I've ever written. It was a long train ride and I think I got carried away.]
Host families and au pairs call it mutual expectations, and management scholars call it the “psychological contract”.
The idea behind a psychological contract is that we agree to give our [...]

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Recent Widower / Single Host Dad: How to find the right au pair?

by cv harquail April 21, 2010

Readers, Here’s a specific question about choosing the right au pair for a family that has lost their mom through tragedy.
We had one host dad comment on our earlier post about single parents, and I know that there are at least two other host dad-readers who have lost their wives and who have hired au [...]

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We interrupt this vacation…

by cv harquail April 19, 2010

Hi AuPairMom readers –
I didn’t think it would be this long between posts — we’ve gone off for a long-awaited family vacation and gotten sidetracked by volcano-related drama. Let it suffice to say that, since we leave for home from Rome, at the end of the week, we expect to slip underneath the ash cloud [...]

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Au Pairs and the Single Host Parent

by cv harquail April 18, 2010

We haven’t talked much about the specific challenges of host parent – au pair relationships when there is only one parent, a single parent, involved.
There are some challenges that are specific to the gender & orientation balance, of, say, a female au pair and a single host dad, or a male au pair and a [...]

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Au Pair Asks: When Host Kids Are Mean

by cv harquail April 6, 2010

Hi Readers, we interrupt our regularly scheduled plan for an emergency request for advice that popped up in the comments of the previous post. Here’s the issue, from VA AuPairMaidNanny:

Some of you dedicated readers & Host Parents will remember that I posted a few weeks ago about my experience so far. Many of you gave [...]

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A Good Au Pair Relationship Requires Your Emotional Investment

by cv harquail April 2, 2010

Regardless of the type of childcare your family chooses for your kid(s), there is always some work involved in maintaining your relationship with the actual caregivers.
With a daycare center, you need to communicate with the staff members and with the administrators on things ranging from schedules to toilet-training strategies. With your mother, mother-in-law or other [...]

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