Stories from the Trenches – The Flood

Perhaps the scariest part of taking the plunge into au pairing is fear of the unknown.  What’s it going to be like?  What if I make some massive faux pas and burn someone else’s house down or lose their kid?  What if I can’t make a single friend out there?  What if the host family is a bunch of jerks?

It’s for this very reason that we here at How to Au Pair have decided to share some stories from the other side with our readers, especially a few worst-case-scenario cautionary tales that may provide you comfort while you’re browsing matching sites for your ideal host family.

The Flood:

It was summer in France, which means the little ski town of Chante Merle was quiet and lazy, emptied of tourists for the summer.  Roadwork and construction could be done in this lull and while the heat blazed overhead, the locals and their au pairs frequented the lakes and swimming pools nearby for some much sought-after relief.

The power and water had been out in my friend Lucie’s host home for hours, so after some useless self-fanning and idle complaining, we’d decided the most sensible course of action was to pack up the children and head down to the lakes to wait out the hottest part of the day.

We passed the afternoon lazing around under a tree while we watched the three little girls we were caring for attempt to balance on a fallen log from the docks to a small island in the shallow lake.  They were having fun and we weren’t doing much of anything.

Bliss.

Kinda Like This

Little did we know that while we stretched ourselves out on the soft grass of the lake-front, the water sprang back to life in Lucie’s house.  While this generally wouldn’t have been anything of note, unbeknownst to us, the little girl who lived in that house had been trying to make the upstairs shower turn on and had wiggled the shower head around to be pointing outward.

We would remain happily unaware of what was happening until a frantic phone call from Lucie’s host mom slashed through our day.  Apparently it was raining in the living room.  Water had flooded the entire top floor of the house and was seeping down to the ground level in a drizzle.

Needless to say the host mother was irate.  A handful of frantic neighbors were present when we got back to the house, trying to shove the water out with an array of mops and makeshift tools.

It was catastrophic.

Obviously that was not a happy day for anyone involved, but the truly remarkable thing is that it did not destroy Lucie’s experience with her host family.  In fact, she was invited back for winter holidays to go skiing with them and maintained a good relationship after the fact.

Chances are that wherever you end up, you aren’t going to flood a house.  The lesson here is that whether you’ve broken a plate or bleached a bed sheet, worse has happened and still turned out okay.

Still, might be worth checking the shower heads before leaving home if you’re ever in a similar situation…