Au pair of the year
We entered into the au pair program after our most recent live-in “nanny” (not an au pair) had left without notice, abused our trust, and stole from our home. We were broken and wondered if we would ever be able to trust anyone again with our most precious children. And then we met Sanna.
Sanna spent the first week since her arrival, just getting to know us, and in that short week it became incredibly obvious we had both gotten much more than we bargained for. I wasn’t looking at just our next live-in “nanny” but someone who had the potential to become my best friend. Her English was stellar; she is fluent and has been so since her arrival, which is important to understanding our off-the-wall jokes and sarcasm. Our strange sense of humor, however, wasn’t all that we had in common, we come from similar types of families, share the same views of the world, look forward to the same types of adventures, and immediately felt comfortable telling each other just about anything.
With regard to her duties as an au pair, Sanna didn’t sign up for an easy job with grown kids where she would only have to drive them to and from school each day. With a feisty three year old and an 8-month old in tow, we knew she had signed up for the type of job it took a truly loving and hard-working person to even want. Our daughter even screamed like a banshee for 20 minutes straight in the background of one of our Skype interviews and Sanna wasn’t the least bit phased.
Because we were so painfully aware of the probable extreme difficulty of her position here, when we listed out her duties during the interview process, we required nothing but to literally “keep the kids alive.” To our surprise, she took it upon herself to start doing their laundry, help with the dishes, clean up their toys; just an endless amount of things we never even asked her to do. We can only assume that she did them because she saw me struggling to get it all done on a daily basis and cared about me enough to want to help, making even more work for herself… as if she needed it!
I work from home, and some days I listen to her interactions with my children; I note her patience with my tantrum-y daughter and teething son daily. Her tone with them is never anything but soothing and diplomatic, and every difficult situation is handled exactly as I would, myself, or as she has been instructed to handle it.
Whenever I am tempted to yell or take an annoyed tone with my daughter, I remind myself that Sanna somehow makes it through every day without ever doing that and it makes me want to be a better mother. Forget the Swedish chocolate I’ve enjoyed or the fun comparisons of Sweden to America, to have a person who you can go to for a hug when you’ve had a rough day, watch Quantico or Vampire Diaries with because your husband refuses, to blame for loading the dishwasher the wrong way when you need a scapegoat with the hubs… but to have someone you think is actually BETTER than you are at looking after your children - we simply couldn’t ask for more.
In conclusion, we have gone from feeling beaten down and paranoid about the person we are entrusting with our children to feeling like the luckiest family in the world to have welcomed such an amazing person into our homes and our hearts. I hope her Swedish family comes to visit soon, so I can shake her mother’s hand and properly thank her for raising a person I often wonder how I ever lived without.
Och på frågan: vad har du lärt dig om Sverige svarade hon:
Sanna has made us realize the following: American chocolate is disgusting. Not all Swedish people know how to make good meatballs. Swedish versions of American songs sound incredibly strange to me. Half of the stuff my sister has told me about Norway is crap. If you are in Sweden on midsummer you might think you're seeing drunk nymphs singing about frogs. Shorts dresses are awesome but incredibly inconvenient when you have to go to the bathroom. Who knew Pippi Longstocking was Swedish (okay maybe I just lived under a rock on that last one).