| While the kids in this family are awesome and the family is fun to be with at first, they ask a lot more of you than they will tell you at first. After a couple of weeks, I was expected to do the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, getting the kids up and ready for school and kindy (by myself most days) and dropping them off, working on homework with them, serving and cleaning up dinner, bathing the little ones, putting them to bed, cleaning up after dinner and then finally passing out around 8:30 or 9:00.
They say that you will have most of the day off, but you end up working all day long to get everything done. The mother has Mondays off, but will often expect you to use your free time to take care of the kids instead, and is gone so much with work that one of the kids once asked me to be her mommy. They also say that you won't have to pick up the little ones from kindy, but that isn't true either.
It isn't a team effort at all, and I actually was told at the end that the adults would intentionally leave things out to see if I would pick them up, and then discuss it behind my back. I felt more like a maid than a nanny. When there are visitors, you're put in this little room which would be fine, except that the walls are very thin and they'll stay up very late watching TV loudly right outside the room and still expect you to rise early with the kids.
Near the end, I accidentally left my laptop open with my webcam on (I had been filming a video to send to my mom), and when I got home I found that Sarah had come into my room and gone through my emails.
When I sent Sarah a very professional email asking if it might be a good time to reconsider my position, as she obviously didn't trust me, Sarah drove home early, found me hanging laundry in the backyard and came out screaming at me in front of all of the neighbors.
They refused to let me get a word in, fired me on the spot for "spying," clearly embarrassed at being caught invading my privacy like that, and dropped me at a youth hostel with only a week's pay and no way to get home. When my mother called the house after she got an email from me saying I needed her to call me, Sarah refused to tell her where I was, or if I was ok. By the time I spoke to my mother she was in hysterics thinking they had done something horrible.
They also said to my mother, "My husband and I are very intelligent people, WHY should we have to answer to YOU?" They offered to pay for part of my stay at the hostel until I could figure something out, but then they just left without giving me any money at all. When it turned out that I had left a (very expensive) purse and pair of jeans there, Sarah came to the hostel when I wasn't there and just handed them to a random person.
Luckily this was a decent person who didn't steal my things, but I was furious nonetheless. My mom ended up having to charge my $1,000 plane ticket to get me home, putting her in a terrible place financially. Overall, my experience in this family was very traumatic. |
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