Au pairing

I've gotten questions about what I do on a daily basis.  It's not really hard to imagine: I take the children to school, pick them up; take them to extracurricular stuff; watch, play with, and sometimes feed the youngest ones; help the older ones with their English homework; help D with her piano and singing, and run little errands for the mother.

A typical weekday (aside from Wednesday) looks like this:

Get up around 7:15, arrive there at 8, take 10 year old J to school.

Get home around 9am, read, relax, and/or nap until 11:45ish.

Pick up baby O from daycare at 12pm, hang out with him in the Luxembourg park (usually he falls asleep by the time we get there so I just sit on a bench and read - if not we play in the sandbox in the park).

Take O home around 1, feed him lunch or play if he wakes up, leave around 1:30-2 when the mother gets home from work.

Go home or do errands or sit in a cafe until 4ish, pick up either 3 year old M from school, take her to the park with her friends or home if she's tired OR pick up J from school and take him to a cooking class or orthographe.

If I take M or J home, I'll give them a snack and watch them either until 6:30 or so (usually the mother is out with O at this time but sometimes not), or if D is home I might give her a 45 minute piano lesson around 5:30.  Sometimes following that I have dinner with the family or give one of the little ones a bath then go home around 7.

One night a week D has music lessons until 8:30pm so I stick around and pick her up, leaving for home around 9. 

That is the standard set-up, but often one of the kids has somewhere else I have to take them after school. 

In France young kids don't have school on Wednesdays and bigger kids only go until about 12pm.  So on Wednesdays I arrive around 9am, watch J and M in the morning and pick up O at 12 and bring him home and feed him.  I take J to tennis and/or cooking and M to dance in the afternoons, after the mother gets home, then do a piano lesson with D late in the afternoon or take the little ones to the park.  Following that I might take someone another place or just watch them while the mother gets errands done, then have dinner with them and leave.

As you can see, a lot of my time here is going to parks - their schools are close to the Luxembourg gardens, which is lovely and has playgrounds for babies and for bigger kids.  I don't know what I'm going to do with O once it's too cold/rainy to take him to the park, as it's hard to get him home and up to the apartment without waking him up, and if he wakes up it's hard to get him to sleep again without walking with him in the stroller.  We'll see I guess.

So I run around Paris a lot with them, which is actually kind of cool because I'm getting to know neighborhoods I hadn't spent much time in before.  At some point I'm going to do a cooking class with J at one of the grands magasins (one of three old, famous department stores in Paris - like Harrods but cooler, and they all have cooking classes) and I'm really excited for that.  I've met some other au pairs, some English speakers, some not, but they all seem nice. 

I'm liking what I do so far but of course the kids get on my nerves frequently enough.  Especially M, she is a handful and can be very nasty.  Baby O likes me a lot and is always super excited when I come get him from daycare.  He's such a good baby that it mostly makes up for M.  I definitely like being able to travel around Paris and see the everyday lives of non-student French Parisians.