Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle) (11 page)

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Authors: Alex McCord,Simon van Kempen

BOOK: Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle)
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Alex
OK, I made that up. But here’s a real one—an e-mail from a parent at François’ school:
From: “Concerned Parent”
To: Me
Subject: Re: Your Nanny
 
 
I just thought you should know that when your caregiver picks François up from school, she leaves Johan in the stroller at the bottom of the stairs. I felt obligated to stay with him until she returned.
On the surface this sounded dangerous, and I went straight to the school security guard the next day and asked about it. Turns out the stroller with Johan strapped into it was inside the gate, under the eyes of the school guard, who also had an eye on the other toddlers in their strollers at the bottom of the stairs.
I’m dating myself here, but do you remember the sitcom
Bewitched
? I used to watch reruns when I was about François’ age and wished I could twitch my chin and make things fly. The nosey neighbor, Mrs. Kravitz, always snooped on Samantha Stevens and ran to tell her husband that something strange was going on. In the 21st century, the Mrs. Kravitzes of the world don’t need to bother telling their husbands but can head straight to their computers to find a blog, any blog, that will welcome their rants. From the aforementioned
ISawYourNanny.Blogspot.com
to the hundreds of localized parenting bulletin boards or Yahoo or Google groups like
ParkSlopeParents.com
and BoCoCaParents, these boards, predominantly located in urban environments, are filled with overzealous (and bored?) Stay At Home Moms (SAHMS) who regularly report every little potential transgression of other children’s caregivers.
Personally I think reading online nanny sightings is about as useful as hitting yourself in the head repeatedly. One thing I’ve learned recently is that cyberspace is an excellent dumping ground for negative energy: Internet posters use blogs and message boards as a way of getting out their own anger and frustration without attacking people they know in their everyday lives. Why would you trust an anonymous poster who describes your child and says that your caregiver was inattentive and chatting on the phone while the child played? Yes, I’m coming from the perspective that nothing terrible has ever been reported about any of my caregivers, and I suppose that it serves a function in that regard, however, shouldn’t you have a bond of trust with a caregiver anyway? I’ve taken issue with other people’s nannies exactly twice since we’ve had kids. Once, a nanny just seemed like she was venturing into the danger zone of being overtired and irritated, and was screaming at her charge when it didn’t really seem warranted. I’d been near her in the park for 30 minutes. I asked her if she had an extra wipe, just to break the tension. It seemed to work, and she seemed not to have noticed my passive-aggressive intervention. Another time, also at the park, I reached into my stroller bag to discover that someone had stuffed the bag with copies of
Awake!
and some other Jehovah’s Witness handouts. I asked the most likely suspect if she’d put them in my stroller. She answered, “Yes, can we talk about it?” No, thanks. I prefer my park visits without proselytizing.
We’ve been through several levels of childcare in the six and a half years we’ve been parents of children outside the womb. When François was a newborn we basically took him everywhere we went, and only left him for short bursts with friends. At 10 months, we started him two days a week in a private daycare, which we continued for a year until shortly before Johan’s birth when we welcomed our first au pair.
 
Simon
Our international travel schedule was much greater (and easier) when we only had one child, and a couple of times a year we’d be in London on business. When François was around 11 months old we were staying in a hotel and needed a sitter for two separate occasions. On the first night, my ex-wife, Carol, was more than happy to look after François and so she came to our room, watched over a sleeping François while she ordered room service and demolished a half bottle of red wine. When we got back that night François was still sleeping and Carol wasn’t far from needing to, too. We loaded her in a taxi, and the next night when we also needed another sitter, we couldn’t use Carol as she was having dinner with us. This was in late 2004 and Craigslist had just launched in London and as such the few posts on it were mostly by American expats. So we perused the childcare postings and found a postgrad student who was studying in London for a year. We checked out her references from her previous childcare work in Connecticut both via e-mail and then by phone and confirmed her for that night. Wow, you may say that it is dangerous to hire an unknown expat to look after one of life’s greatest possessions, but is it anymore dangerous than getting a sitter through the hotel (like we had done previously in Morocco)?
 
Alex
Morocco? Ha! We took François with us when he was five weeks old and hired a babysitter through the hotel for the couple of hours we couldn’t take him to events with us. It was a company retreat for Simon and most of the planned family activities were fine for a baby, but there were a couple of cocktail parties and a dinner where I couldn’t avoid needing childcare. The young lady was a local student, and the only common language we spoke was French. She managed to overfeed him all the pumped milk I’d left her in the first hour, and instead of calling me, rang down to room service for cow’s milk. That night we learned he wasn’t allergic! The next night, after solving the milk situation by giving her a feeding schedule and a tin of formula just in case, I still managed to learn another, somewhat delayed lesson. If you leave your backup cell phone in the room, lock it in the safe. The following month after receiving a huge bill, it took three calls to our cellular provider to explain why I had several hours worth of phone calls to an unlisted number in Saudi Arabia.
 
Bar Tabac Brunch with Au Pair Rosa
 
There is no one perfect solution to childcare, and it’s true that it takes more than just the parents to raise a child. We were very happy with the daycare we chose to begin with but weren’t sure how we’d like the au pair program. Basically you have someone come and live with you for a year, or potentially two years if you apply for an extension, though we never took advantage of that. Au pairs normally wind up in the program during a gap year between high school and college, or college and grad school, and are between the ages of 18 and 26. They can be from any country with which the U.S. has diplomatic relations and it is seen as a cultural and educational exchange with a requirement that the au pair complete a certain number of college courses during her stay. That’s the official version. In the handbook they don’t tell you what to do when the au pair comes into your bedroom in the middle of the night crying because she feels sick, or how to console a teenager who can’t perform her babysitting duties because she’s upset about something her boyfriend posted about her on Facebook.
The positives about having an au pair are that in a best-case scenario she becomes a member of the family. We could set the work schedule weekly and with a good household relationship there was opportunity for last-minute flexibility when we needed it. A young caregiver has lots of energy and the ability to keep up with two active boys, and is relatively malleable and mentally able to adapt to the childcare style of the parents. With all the visa paperwork handled by the agency, traveling abroad with an au pair is drama-free as long as she remembers her passport! A young au pair enjoys running around in the park and throwing balls, marauding through street fairs and blowing bubbles. The negatives are that you wind up parenting the au pair as well, that the condition of the house reflects that a teenager lives in it, and you may come home to find them borrowing your clothes, watching
Gossip Girl
with your toddlers and downloading naughty pictures onto their computers during off hours—we learned quickly to keep the au pair’s computer separate from our household network after accidentally opening a video of her with her boyfriend we just really, truly did not need to see. Bring on the brain bleach! Sometimes we’d run into food issues—lots of teenagers love soda and candy, and it’s difficult to have that around a child without being cajoled into giving them “just one taste.” We did make it a household rule that our au pairs couldn’t eat junk food on duty, and gave them a mini fridge in their room for contraband. What wound up being crucial for us when hiring au pairs was meeting the candidate in advance to be sure we were on the same page. We participated in the program for three years—the first year we met the father and a cousin, the second year we met the au pair and her mother, and they came to our house and the final year all interviewing was conducted over the phone. That last year was the only year we had a problem. Of course no year was perfect and there were always little ups and downs—over the three years I’d say that our biggest difficulties were to do with sharing our home with a teenager and dirty dishes and laundry being left around. The final year, however, there were serious cultural issues.
The direct translation of au pair is “on par” or equal to, and an au pair is meant to be treated as a member of the family. We went out of our way to make sure this happened during all three years including taking them with us on weekend trips, subscriptions to French cable TV, concert tickets and evenings out, but the final year we had a girl who just wasn’t a good fit. She was sullen, melodramatic and kept a blog about how she hated Americans, hated France, hated us and the children but loved New York. I think she must have thought we were idiots, and when she asked to leave early we were only too happy to get her out of our home. Unfortunately that experience soured us on the whole program, but after three years we were also more than ready to have a caregiver who didn’t live with us. We replaced her with our housekeeper/relief nanny, who up until that point had been coming in one day per week for over a year, and who is still with us.
Alex: Our au pair is going back to France early
François: Is she coming back?
Alex: No she’s not
François: Good May I have her room?
 
We’ve been lucky to keep our nanny since then, though now the chums are both in school full time and we don’t need her as much as we used to. Since she doesn’t work 40 hours per week anymore, we picked a schedule everyone could live with and keep it sacred for everyone’s sanity. We’ve seen what happens when friends of ours keep their caregivers around the clock—at some point even the extra pay doesn’t seem worth it. Given that our crazy schedules sometimes change at the last minute, we’ve cultivated a list of relief babysitters. Some of our resources have included a former au pair who returned to NYC for school, the high school-aged neighbors on our street, single friends who enjoy playing with kids, my cousin’s son who moved to Williamsburg and plays in a band, etc. As the boys grow up, we enjoy bringing in male babysitters when we can, which comes with another set of issues. Guys are great with playing foosball and riding bikes in the park; not so great with making beds and getting the little beasts bathed. We’ve come to accept that tradeoff and the boys love it when they can have a playdate with a big boy. A former boyfriend of a relative of mine lives a few blocks away and is in grad school—Simon and I recently left the boys in his care and as we went out the door they were happily playing guitar and spraying each other with Mr. Clean in the garden. Perfect! (Note to potentially horrified readers: they weren’t actually spraying each other with undiluted cleaner. Ever since François could walk and talk, he’s been kind of obsessed with the animated Mr. Clean. That didn’t bother me at all because I am obsessed with Mr. Clean as well, even more so now that the new disinfecting bath spray comes with the freshness of Febreze, knocking out germs and smells of boys’ feet. I told you I was obsessed—didn’t believe me, did you?) When anyone would spray a surface, he’d desperately want to help. I took to saving a bottle or two with the label intact and filling with plain water. He’d proudly walk around saying, “Now I’m Mr. Cleaner.” But I digress.
Regardless of whether the caregiver is an au pair, a nanny or a backup babysitter, one question often asked during interviews is, “Do you use a nanny-cam?” I prefer to hire someone I can trust implicitly and then leave them to it—I couldn’t imagine having a camera set up where I’d watch the children every hour. For one thing, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on work, and for another, where is the trust? At work I’ve never looked over the shoulder of anyone who reports to me, so why would I do so with the caregiver of my children? I’ve always said, don’t drug them or hit them, report any accidents or fighting at the end of the day and keep them from running into traffic. Allow a maximum of one hour of TV per day and make sure they go outside unless the weather is bad. Beyond that, it’s up to them. Confidence in your caregiver breeds confidence in their care of the children. I love it when shopkeepers in our neighborhood refer to us as François and Johan’s parents. From a very early age and from Johan’s birth, they would patrol the streets of Cobble Hill with their caregivers, and around the age of three some locals began calling François the Mayor of Cobble Hill.

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