House & home

Share The Fun and the Not-So-Fun with Your Au Pair

by cv harquail November 11, 2014

Prompted by our conversation over the weekend about the au pair who was unhappy with the ratio of chores-to-child interaction in his work week, I’m reposting something from 2009: One super-helpful piece of advice my friend Adelaide gave me when we got our first au pair was “Be Sure to Share the Cream.” Share both […]

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Au Pair Asks: How can I tell my Host Family that they’re so noisy they wake me up?

by cv harquail October 22, 2014

If the shoe were on the other foot, we wouldn’t hesitate to tell our au pairs that their early morning or late night behavior was so rowdy that it interrupted our sleep. But when you’re the au pair, and it’s your host family just doing their thing in the kitchen, what can you do? Au […]

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3 Easy Ways to Help Your Au Pair Use Your Home Appliances Correctly

by cv harquail October 10, 2014

American appliances have too many options. Having endless options is great for getting just the right setting for a specific task, but it becomes quite a problem when you’re forever trying to remember which combinations of buttons and levers to press. Between our vacuum cleaner (5 attachments, 3 wands and 5 buttons), our washer (23 […]

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Smelly House: Host Mom Hates Air Fresheners

by cv harquail September 11, 2014

Attention readers: This second post about smells and host parents is absolutely unrelated to the previous post. The Au Pair in the first post and the Au Pair here are not the same person, and the host parents aren’t the same people. It was coincidence that TACL brought up this issue last week….I already had […]

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My Host Family’s House is Smelly. What should I do?

by cv harquail September 10, 2014

Everyone’s house has a smell. Sometimes it’s “dog”, sometimes it’s “curry” and sometimes it’s just “ick”. We don’t usually notice the everyday smell of our own home because we’re accustomed to it. But when our au pairs walk in for the first time, they notice because the smell is new to them. Over time, they […]

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When a Host Family Takes Advantage of ‘Pitching In’

by cv harquail July 17, 2014

Readers- Here’s the email that prompted my earlier post about defining what it means to “pitch in”. Clearly, someone in this Host Family has a different interpretation of what that means. Hi AuPairMom, I need your help in forming an opinion for my self regarding dishwashing. I am working with a family of 2 parents, […]

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“Pitching In”: What does that mean in your host family?

by cv harquail July 15, 2014

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What does it mean to “pitch in” with host family chores? Pitching In (defn): To join the family in doing some everyday household upkeep, to help keep the household running smoothly In anticipation of an au pair question that will get posted later this week, I wanted to sketch out the basic advice (okay, my aupairmom […]

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Grocery Budgets for An Au Pair: What’s a fair amount?

by cv harquail May 12, 2014

Including an Au Pair in your grocery shopping means more than throwing another package of chicken breasts into the cart. For any of us (all of us?) with budgets and cost constraints, including an Au Pair takes more than figuring out ‘how much’ more food we need to nourish an additional adult. It also asks us to gauge […]

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The Two Biggest Reasons Host Parents Push the Limits of the Au Pair Program

by cv harquail July 18, 2013

Host Parents in the AuPairMom community do their very best to follow the spirit and the letter of the Au Pair Program. Yet even the most honorable, rule-abiding host parents can feel pressure to push the limits of the Au Pair program. Why? Because — as designed– an Au Pair working according to the rules […]

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Should Au Pairs be expected to do chores on their Day Off?

by cv harquail March 12, 2013

In our earlier conversation about what chores are appropriate to ask an au pair to do, AussieAuPair raised an interesting question– When an au pair is officially having a day off, should s/he still be expected to do household chores? We need to make two sets of distinctions first, between — family member household chores […]

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