Working Girl

Just a small update today.

I’m trading in my housewife status. Sort of. Starting Monday, I’ll be working outside my home for pay, so I guess I can no longer call myself a full time housewife.

On the one hand, it’ll be nice to earn a bit of money, as well as get out of the house and interact with people. On the other hand, my blog name is no longer 100% accurate and the people I’ll be interacting with are three little boys. And a cat. (The cat was the whole reason I accepted the job. I love cats more than I love cake.)

There’s not much you can do in the way of earning money while your visa application is in limbo, since you’re not allowed to get a real job. But you can do things that involve private transactions, like hold a garage sale, or in my case, finding a nanny gig.

I’m not as cool as Mary Poppins and I can’t fly… but I do sing!

I guess technically being a nanny is sort of like being a housewife, just in someone else’s home, so I won’t be changing the name of this blog just yet.

I interviewed with several families before I found one where the family and I liked each other equally well. I know a lot of sitters would balk at the idea of signing on to look after three primary school age boys every afternoon. Boys are rowdy, tell fart jokes at the dinner table, jump on the sofa, smear dirt on their faces, and are just generally always getting up to trouble the second your back in turned.

But you know what? Even though my little brothers drove me nuts, I do like boys. I think they are usually a lot more fun than girls. And by the time girls get to be about ten, a lot of them start getting really mean. Some of the families I talked to had daughters who were already developing the early signs of chronic disrespectfulness and I wasn’t cool with that.

And compared to my brothers, who would karate chop random people without warning (thanks, Power Rangers), these boys were remarkably polite and well behaved, though I don’t doubt they are capable of getting up to mischief when it suits them.

They are 11, 10, and 8 years old and one of them has a learning disability. They go to a very regimented private school and their parents want them to get into an after-school homework routine or else they won’t be able to keep up with their workload and the rest of their classmates. Getting little boys to do homework is always a challenge.

I also really liked their parents. These parents made it clear that when I’m with the boys, I’ll always be in charge and they’ll always back me up, even if what I do is different to what they would have done. In the past, I’ve had parents that either refused to let me discipline their kids at all or wouldn’t back me up when I did, and that creates a ton of problems, especially in any long-term child care job.

But the real clincher was the fact that, as I said, they do have a cat and it’s friendly and soft and adorable and I’m allowed to pet it whenever I want. And they also said I can bake cookies in their kitchen whenever I want, which is also great, since G has put a two month moratorium on making any sweet treats here and I was afraid I might starve to death.

So that’s that! I’m looking forward to it and I’m sure I’ll be learning a lot more about Australian sports and slang from these kids.

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