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childcare

Matching: What should a potential au pair tell you about herself?

by cv harquail October 23, 2009

Coordinating with the previous posts about questions an Au Pair should ask a potential host family, what would you like an au pair to tell you about herself? There are perhaps 4,387 categories of things that an au pair could tell you about, so challenge yourself to offer maybe the top 2 or 3… This [...]

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3 Questions an Au Pair should ask YOU to make a good match

by cv harquail October 22, 2009

If Skype didn’t exist, if email hadn’t been invented, and if we could only communicate with potential au pairs using short, really expensive long distance phone calls (anyone remember those days?), we wouldn’t have the luxury of long conversations to help us assess a good match. And since we do have that luxury– and so [...]

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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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Good Bye, Good Luck from exAuPairMom

by cv harquail October 13, 2009

I always wonder about “the rest of the story” when I get a notice that someone has unsubscribed from the email newsletter .. for the reason that “the content is no longer valid”. I usually take that to mean “we don’t have an au pair anymore”. Over the weekend we got this letter from a [...]

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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 [...]

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Male Au Pairs: When would you hire one? (Poll)

by cv harquail September 22, 2009

Have you ever thought about hiring a male au pair? I haven’t considered it, since I have two girls and I’m looking for positive young women as role models…. but one of my girlfriends has a male au pair for their two sons, and she’s found that a male au pair has been just as [...]

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Scheduling your kid(s) week: Can the AP be in charge?

by cv harquail August 25, 2009

I have a question for those seasoned HP’s… School has started for us. I was really prepared with the summer calendar so that the kids (very different ages and needs) were stimulated and the AP wasn’t overwhelmed. But now, one child is in school and the other child is bored. The younger one goes to [...]

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Can you dock her pay if she owes you money? Poll

by cv harquail August 14, 2009

Are there any situations when it’s fair for you to withhold or ‘dock’ your au pair’s pocket money? We skirted around this issue in a previous conversation about when your au pair refuses to work, but never answered it directly. Now, we’ve got a topic request (on Skribit) with a very specific situation: You AP [...]

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Feeding my kids too much fast food… Now what?

by cv harquail June 21, 2009

What is it about Au Pairs and fast food? Maybe because it’s so ‘American’, or because fast food outlets are ubiquitous, or because they are always warm, dry and welcoming public places, fast food emporiums seem to capture the attention of many an au pair. Au pairs seem to spend a lot of time at [...]

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Traveling with Kids: Book to investigate

by cv harquail June 20, 2009

Strolling across the interweb this morning, I came across this review of a book about traveling with kids … and it looks like the kind of information Au Pair host parents might be interested in. Many of us choose to have Au Pairs over US college student live-ins, or other caregivers, because we’d like to [...]

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