AuPairMom » birthdays

Too much excitement for her first weekend?

cv harquail — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:35:13 +0000

Dear Au Pair Mom readers–

We are expecting our very first au pair to arrive tomorrow — we are really excited! And we already have a question about the best ways to get her into the swing of family life.

We were invited to a birthday party the day after the Au Pair arrives. (She arrives on Friday afternoon, and the party is Saturday.) I have a 3 year old and a 2 year old and I am pregnant.

The party will be hectic and crazy. My first inclination is to skip the party and let the Au Pair rest and slowly get acclimated. My other thought is to throw her in the mix and show her how crazy a day in our family can be, but is not always. I don’t want to scare her off and a little kids birthday party might be too much the first day.

What do you experienced host parents think?

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Birthday Parties for Host Kids: Should Au Pairs Be Expected to Attend?

cv harquail — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:52:01 +0000

It took me several years to figure out the whole birthday party thing. By the time I realized that most parents expected to stay for the party– and that I had to feed them — the kids were old enough to be dropped off. That was when I learned that you have to have room for the occasional sibling who is also dropped off without warning. But by the time I could deal with huge random numbers of kids, I had to figure out how to watch dozens of them at some activity while each one had to be escorted to the bathroom- one at a time, of course.

All of the birthday party craziness has been made easier when I’ve been able to have our au pair help. Not only have our au pairs helped to welcome guests and serve cake, they’ve also be great with supervising the scavenger hunts and painting faces for the “Warrior Cats” party.

Every birthday party has been more fun with an au pair’s help. But, even more important, every au pair has loved to play a key part in creating this experience for our children.

For us, the girls’ parties have always been a time that I’ve had our au pairs on duty– but even if I hadn’t, they would all have wanted to be there. So, I was a little surprised by that regular commenter, anonymous, who asked:

Is it okay to insist that an au pair should be around to celebrate the kids birthdays?

Just the nature of that question suggests that all is not right in HostParentVille. But, to the rescue with advice, come:

Host Mommy Dearest:

Here is my take on it. You can try to match with an AP who wants to be part of the family. You can look for an AP who will actually care about your kids and will want to share in their special things like birthdays. If you find that you failed to host an AP like this you *could* schedule her to be on duty during the times you want her around, but then again, if she doesn’t care enough to be there, do you really want her there?

I refuse to schedule my AP just so she will be there to celebrate. She is explicitly invited and I tell her I would love for her to come, but if she doesn’t want to be there (and doesn’t already have some pretty important plans that conflict) then honestly I don’t want her there moping around.

If she doesn’t want to be around for the kids’ birthday celebrations I might question whether I made the right decision to match with her or not.

MTR:

I would not insist. As Host Mommy Dearest said, if she does not want to be there, you would not want her there anyway. Our first au pair was with us for 1.5 months when my older daughter’s birthday came. When we had a family birthday thing, she was there for may be 20 minutes, ate some food, and left to go out with her friends.

Our current au pair has been with us over a year now. She has celebrated all of our birthdays with us and gave us all gifts. The actual birthday party was at the kids amusement park where it was organized in such a way that she would not have been able to spend any kind of quality time with kids or us. She fully planned to be there, but I explained to her how the party will work and told her that although she is always more then welcome, she probably would not enjoy it (I know by know what she might enjoy and what she won’t).

She did not go to the party, but made from scratch cake was presented to my daughter the next day (on her actual birthday) while I was at work and they had a huge cake party for all their stuffed friends. I got pictures at work of the whole process. (awwww!)

TACL:

We have always given our APs invitations to our kids’ birthday parties (our first AP made it clear that she wanted to be invited, not just told). For a long time, before he started school, my son’s best friends were the children who were cared for by other au pairs and nannies – and these children and their APs and nannies were issued invitations as well. I make it clear to the APs that they are not expected to purchase a gift for my son and daughter, and if they do, not to spend a lot of money.

My son’s birthday parties tend to be complicated – he wants a bike race, or a mystery hunt, or something that involves leading kids around our home or neighborhood. Having the AP on hand is necessary. One year our AP and her best friend got to lob water balloons at the kids while they tried to solve the “Mystery of the Stolen Treasure.” I think they had a great time, and seeing the kids whack at a pinata later, moved my AP to get one for a party she threw. For my son’s birthdays, we tend to schedule work hours if the AP is needed to make an event happen. We try to make it clear that they may invited their best friends to attend – there’s always more than enough food.

The Camel’s parties tend to be more sedate, although last year we went to an indoor water park for the entire day, and while I invited my then non-swimming AP, I made it clear to her that I didn’t want to pay the steep admission fee if she wasn’t going to get into the water. She demurred.

What other insights and stories about Au Pairs and Host Kids’ Birthday Parties? Share below….

Your Brother’s Wedding vs. Her 21st Birthday: Whose priority wins? (Poll)

cv harquail — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 01:41:47 +0000

Here’s a tough situation that could use your advice! This host parent is facing what feels like a win/lose situation in a conflict between what the family wants and what the au pair wants.

Check out the details, weigh in at the poll, and then offer some advice!

Dear AuPairMom Readers– I was so glad to find this blog and LOVE the info and advice it provides to host families. I know the topic of vacations has been discussed in the past, I have a more particular have a situation that I would love to get input on, specifically related to whether we can/should ‘require’ our AP to come on vacation with us:

We are planning to take a week long vacation for a family wedding on the east coast in a few months. Our entire family lives there, so we generally travel there once a year.

We have taken our APs in the past and it has worked out really well all around. We have a two and six year old, so the benefit of an extra adult on the long plane ride is super helpful and having a sitter for a few nights and for family events is great.

We also make sure our AP has a reasonable amount of free time to explore the area, visit NYC, etc. We stay with our in-laws, but she has her own room and we do our best to help make her comfortable and assist her with sightseeing plans.

Here’s our current issue:

My brother’s wedding is the EXACT SAME NIGHT as our au pair’s 21st birthday.

Our Au Pair has politely told me that she would greatly prefer to spend her 21st celebrating with her friends in Vegas (which she has already visited twice).

She has been with us for six months and is wonderful with the children, although we’ve had some issues with being part of the family, car usage — just overall personal maturity stuff.

I certainly don’t want to ‘force’ her to go and worry whether she’s miserable during her trip with us. But, at the same time it would be very helpful for us to have her there.

Also, I feel frustrated that she is being shortsighted by not seeing this as a great opportunity for her to experience other parts of the country that otherwise might be too expensive for her to travel to on her own.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Just a quick poll for your immediate reaction (you can choose more than one answer):

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

READERS: (Sunday am) The Original Poster (OP), Melissa, has offered some additional information about the situation to address some of the assumptions and questions raised in the (already) 50+ comments. I’m putting this info right here in the original post, so that you don’t have to scan the whole comment thread to consider her information before sharing your advice. Also, the bolding and underlining are from me, to help you find the various elements. Here it is:

I’m the OP and thought it might be helpful to provide some additional details to our situation. First, thanks so much to everyone who took the time to respond – I really appreciate your input and suggestions and have some really good points to consider!

Regarding whether we ‘need’ our AP on the trip – this has been a tough one for me to determine because the only time I feel like I absolutely ‘need’ my AP is when I am working and I need someone to watch my kids in my absence. So, based on that, no, I don’t absolutely NEED her to be there. However, I work PT from home, so in addition to needing her while I’m working (which is about 25 hrs/week), a signficant part of our family’s purpose for having an AP is to be there during other times (help with homework while I’m making dinner, stay with my napping 2 yr old while I’m out with my other daughter, travel with us, etc), which we make very clear during the application process. We don’t have any family around, so this is a HUGE help for us and the reason that we choose an AP, and that ‘helping’ piece is a significant part of her job for us.

Finding another babysitter is an idea we have considered, and may wind up doing. However, our entire family will be at the wedding, so we would have to find someone other than a relative or family friend. Our 75 yr old parents would have no idea who to recommend for a local babysitter, so we would probably have to resort to care.com or something similar, which I’m not real thrilled with doing. Instead I would probably just bring the kids to the wedding and have my husband run around after them most of the evening (I’m in the wedding party) and leave early, if we need to.

I should have been more clear in my OP, that if we did bring our AP with us, it would be a working week for her and definitely not have her use any of her vacation time. And we’d make sure she has ample time to sightsee and relax (and give her some extra spending cash or pay for her sightseeing, which we’ve done in past trips with prior APs).

I do realize the importance of her 21st birthday, and was considering some of the things that others suggested, such as contributing toward a ticket for bringing a friend (a friend who will be on school break during that time, not an AP so no need to use up vacation time), or possibly even paying for her stay in Vegas the following weekend. And I don’t have any opinion about where she wants to go for her birthday (I personally love Las Vegas and see the appeal for her).

However, we have been very generous with her (in my opinion) – we provide her with her own car, cell phone and laptop, and we’ve tried to be pretty accommodating to her social schedule (she is our first AP who is quite a ‘partyier’ and that’s been an adjustment for us) by giving her off on New Years Eve, letting a friend from home stay with us for two weeks, giving her off most weekend nights, posting her schedule well in advance, etc. She is very nice and polite around us and never really complains or sulks or displays any immature emotional behavior.

The issues that we’ve encounted so far have all been regarding her free time. She is gone virtually all the time, which limits her ability to be part of our family (she’s probably had dinner with us less than 15 times over 6 months) and she has ‘pushed the limit’ with a lot of things, like always asking for exceptions to our worknight curfew, having male friends over later than we said she could, constantly keeping the car out overnight, etc. So we’ve had to have some talks about those things and set some additional rules. If we did require her to go on the trip with us, I don’t think she would be sulky or difficult, but b/c her social life and partying is so important to her, I know that while she wouldn’t be miserable, she probably wouldn’t be thrilled to be there.
Anyway, sorry for the looong post! Hope that additional information gives a bit more insight into my question. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts!!!

Wedding – Flower Girl from bitchplz on Flickr

On celebrating each other’s religious holidays

cv harquail — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:44:31 +0000

Only 4.5 weeks till Hanukkah, 8 weeks until Christmas, 9 until New Years… Time to think about weaving your Au Pair into your family’s celebrations.

You should think ahead, and talk with your au pair, because holidays can be important times to feel in or out of a family, acknowledged or overlooked, celebrated or taken for granted.

Here’s a question we received from an au pair’s point of view:

I’m a Christian Au Pair for a Muslin Family, with a question about celebrating holidays.

My birthday occurred in my first month with my family and so I didn’t expect a gift or celebration.
Recently, my host family celebrated their holiday Eid. I bought something for the kids, and I expected something from them on Eid, but they didn’t give me a gift on that holiday. Now Christmas is coming, a holiday that I celebrate as a Christian. In December, I’ll have been with my host family for 9 months.

Should I expect something for Christmas?

Dear AP -

At the very least, we should each other’s religious holidays.

Acknowledging a holiday means that we know the holiday is coming, talk about what it means to the person who celebrates it, and plan ahead so that the person who celebrates the holiday has time off to go to church, temple, the mosque, or elsewhere.

In contrast, celebrating the holiday means to get more involved. To me, that means to participate in the holiday, to decorate for it, cook the special foods, and participate in religious and non-religious rituals — like at Christmas, giving gifts. It might be too much to ask that we ‘celebrate’ other people’s religious holidays, since often the holidays don’t co-exist comfortably. (For example, celebrating Christmas is sometimes experienced by non-Christians as a kind of cultural imperialism.)

Gift-giving, oddly enough, seems to fall between the space of acknowledging and celebrating. Being given a gift recognizes the importance of the holiday to you, but also might feel like participating in it to them. Personally, I think that it would have been nice of them to include you in the celebration of their holiday — indeed, since you made an effort to celebrate with them, leaving you out was not very thoughtful. (But it happens, mostly because people don’t think ahead and/or pay attention). But I would not expect your host family to give you a gift– that might be too much ‘celebrating’ for them.

Instead, have a conversation with your host family about how you might want to celebrate Christmas.

Ask in advance for the time off that you want. I think it is appropriate to have a religious holiday as an off duty day, doing your 45 hrs of on-duty time on other days.

Be clear about if you want to go to church, and when, so that you have have transportation.

Talk with your host parents about whether or not they would like you to share some of your Christmas traditions with them… for example, if they are a religious family, they might like to have you talk about what Christmas means to you spiritually. Or, they might prefer a more secular cultural exchange.

See this as an opportunity to clarify what you need and talk with your host family about what they might like. Plan in advance so you can accommodate each other.

Finally, consider that you might need to make plans to join with another au pair or two to do some celebrating in your off duty time…. you don’t want to miss out on the holiday (that could even get you homesick).

Host parents, what do you think? Au pairs? Please share….

Islamic Christmas Ornament by Kyle Design (only $14.95)