We have had a drama filled week and big life changes are ahead for our family. I don't have the energy to share the full version, so here is the highlight reel.....
On Wednesday, our au pair Katharina told us that she was too homesick to finish the year and she was leaving the program. The original plan was for her to stay for a few weeks (per agency guidelines), to give us a chance to make alternative childcare arrangements (my busy season is the next two weeks!). Midday Thursday, she informed us that she had booked a flight for next Friday and could no longer care for Oliver. Things went downhill from there. Katharina is now flying home tomorrow, as the agency would not allow her to stick around if she wasn't working. It is going to be so hard for us to explain to Oliver what happened to his Dee-Ta (Katharina). She didn't handle the situation well and it is a shame that things between us are ending on such a sour note.
Fortunately, our daycare center has room to take Oliver. He still hasn't adjusted to daycare and I had hoped we could do a week of half days (he goes just 2 mornings a week, currently) to ease in to the new routine, but that just isn't in the cards. He will be going fulltime Mon-Thurs. We decided to keep him out on Fridays, so he can attend gymnastics. Fortunately, Adam & I both have vacation days remaining, and December is a pretty slow time in finance-land, so we will alternate having him. We thought some family members also might like to come and spend a day with Bubba.
We are holding out hope that Jana might be able to come back and help us out for a few weeks, but she has a job now and is interviewing for internship/study programs, and we certainly don't expect her to put her life on hold to help us. We did Skype with her yesterday and Oliver was SO excited to see her -- maybe that will pull on her heart strings a bit (Jana - did it work?) Our offer to pay for her flight over doesn't hurt either since she was already trying to arrange a visit.
We have started our au pair search and are interviewing 3 au pair candidated tomorrow. If we could find somone we like, the next match date would have an au pair join us on Dec 8th. We aren't too optomistic that we will find someone interested in starting before the new year. This late in the year, could you really blame them for wanting to stay home through the holidays? I wouldn't be sad to have the house to ourselves over Christmas, instead of having someone new with us either.
No comments:
Post a Comment