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Is a sexy au pair a fate worse than death?

It’s so predictable. Mention you’re interviewing au pairs and the first thing people say is “Get an ugly one”.

Well, they don’t say it actually. They snigger it. Blame it on the age-old reputation of men – although undoubtedly Jude Law and Ethan Hawke haven’t helped matters with their high-profile getting-it-on with their nannies. Get an attractive 20something around a man and, so the thinking goes, he’s unable to contain himself.

Frankly, this is the least of my worries. I need a young woman (or man) who’s responsible enough to look after my daughter, engaged enough to make her after school hours fun, cool headed enough to deal with any emergencies that come up, yet with modest enough expectations that we can actually afford him or her. And I need to be able to live with them in my house. If Scarlett Johansson fit the criteria, I’d hire her.

I figure if my husband’s susceptible to an affair, he’s more likely to a tasty tidbit among the intelligent and attractive women he works with in the City. Besides, as anyone who’s married knows, familiarity breeds contempt. And if you’re paying someone to live with you yet they still leave pans with caked-on baked beans in the sink, it’s hardly conducive to romance. That’s one thing I know from experience.

Picture: Scarlett Johansson in the Nanny Diaries

Do you have a cyber-sitter?

Chris Ayres writes about finding his babysitter online via SitterCity.com in LA. We've been doing the same since my daughter was 4 months old, with www.Sitters.co.uk. At first I used it to book the wonderful Marcela to play with my daughter so I could check emails, nap and otherwise get things done around the house. Then I moved on to going to Pilates (I KNOW, sooo yummy). Now, when our regular local sitters aren't available we phone up and they find us someone, typically an off-duty maternity nurse or nanny that we've used before but sometimes not.

It occasionally makes me nervous to have a stranger in the house looking after our child. But as Ayres says:

Sure, it's always better to enlist family members with childminding tasks, but if your nearest relatives are 3,000 miles away, and if your friends are all single and more familiar with the advanced settings of Gmail than those of an eight-month-old, what are you to do? Besides, doesn't it make more sense to hire someone who qualifies for the job rather than someone who qualifies as a relative?

www.sitters.co.uk

Childcare: Lost in translation

Jenny Colgan blogs on bringing up children in France.

The problem with learning a language, as my husband mournfully pointed out, is finding people willing to chat to you in it. Let’s face it, everyone in the entire world speaks English much much better and faster than you can possibly contribute the other way round, so you really have to fling yourself at neighbours, shop assistants and anyone you can pin up against a wall for a few minutes, ignoring the panicky look in their eyes, and forcibly hurl conjugated verbs at them. I dislike it, but find myself oiling up to my friend’s mother and always engaging her in chat, not because I really like her (though she is delightful), but because she doesn’t speak a word of English.

However there is one area that we’re getting a lot of practice; namely, trying to find some childcare for the toddler. Having failed to get him a nursery place by not putting his name down some eighteen months before conception, we’ve been given a list of women who do assistance maternelle; state subsidised childminding in an inspected home with no more than four children. That sounded ideal for us, desperately trying to get Wallace to pick up at least some of the language before he starts school in September.

We don’t have to send him to the local school of course; there’s always the international school in nearby Cannes where they speak English, but we were trying to keep him from wearing a pink scarf and becoming addicted to hard drugs for as long as possible.

Plus, we really don’t want to become the full-on ex-pat cliches, not learning the language or integrating. Okay, so perhaps we do pour slightly strong gin and tonics on a Friday night. And maybe I sneak a Sunday Times from the international newsagents at the weekend. But that’s it, honestly. We don’t even have hilariously colourful builder.

So, on the phone it is to try and track someone down. Most of these women are ex-teachers, so are very hot on your pronunciation. So you say something, they get you to repeat it correctly, then they say something back which you don’t understand and you have to get them to repeat it, and the whole thing takes quite some time. In fact, perhaps I should just coldcall people, rather than pay our French teacher, Bernadette the Martinet lots of money to terrify the life out of us once a week and rant on about how much she regrets voting for Nicolas Sarkozy, le president bling-bling.

However, I think I have finally learned that the situation is this:

1. Assistance maternelle is really only for babies of full-time workers waiting for nursery places, and not over-grown nearly three year olds.

2. They only do nine to five, as otherwise it’s not worth their time financially, but as we’re lucky enough not to have to put the kids in full-time care, we’re not going to.

3. So. Stuff you.

Wallace’s third birthday is on us.

"NOW AH AM THREE AH GO SCHOOL!" he mentions proudly to everyone he meets. "AH GO SCHOOL TOMORROW MUMMY?"

I wonder if he’ll enjoy it quite so much when he gets there and finds he can’t understand a word anyone says?

Childminders face huge rise in Ofsted fee

In modern life we've (or at least I've) come to expect that the government actually doesn't have any big vision for what it's trying to do. A thousand different departments each pursue their own little goals and look to tick their boxes so they get home on time each night. If a couple of discs with millions of bits of sensitive information go missing, well, you know, we tried.

But the news today of higher Ofsted fees for nurseries and childminders is jaw-droppingly shortsighted.

The Government wants Ofsted to start generating money to cover its operating costs. This just illustrates the root problem with the way government approaches childcare and education in the UK. Ofsted's job has been to inspect schools, nurseries and childminders to make sure they are providing the care and education our children need, and by all accounts it's one of the few bodies whose advice people really rely on. It's not perfect but it doesn't get into bed with the industries it regulates and its rankings are valued. It's a children's service that actually works like it's supposed to.

Alphamummy talks to Claire Verity's producer

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Many people don't know Daisy Goodwin's name. While she's edited poetry books and been a TV presenter and produced television series, outside of those industries in which she works few could conjure up her name. But if you're a parent, you might consider Goodwin one of the most influential people of the past year.

Her work has been attacked as "dangerous" and "exploitative". She was the executive producer behind the Bringing Up Baby series on Channel 4. Which is to say, she was Claire Verity's producer.

Discussions raged around the show (and on this blog), which ran in autumn 2007 and featured the controversial maternity nurse who advocated rigid methods that include leaving babies to cry and putting them outside every day. Also on the show were Claire Scott, an advocate of attachment-style parenting, and Dreena Hamilton, who suggests a method more influenced by Dr Spock and the idea of understanding your child.

We caught up with Goodwin at a roundtable discussion organised by Charlotte Faircloth in Cambridge in December. Parenting experts, including Dream Babies author Christina Hardyment and Dr Ellie Lee from the Parenting Culture Studies Group, met to discuss Bringing Up Baby: Parenting, Expertise and the Media. The discussion ranged from the glut of parenting advice - there are more childcare manuals sold in this country than live babies born - to how children are expected to reflect on their parents (too much, attendees maintained).

Click on the video above to see Goodwin discuss her controversial TV show.

Now Claire Verity's having a go at public breastfeeding!

SCREAM! I'm getting so HIGH off the HATRED I feel for Claire Verity!
"I don't want people getting their breasts out at the dinner table," she says. "Or dropping their trousers." Blimey O'Reilley! She thinks breasts are DIRTY! As if to prove her breast/bottom confusion, she advises you go and breastfeed in the TOILET!
It's just more proof that Verity knows nothing. Do a twenty minute feed in a toilet? In my urban experience, anyone spending more than six minutes in a toilet will either be subject to a series of vexed knocks and cough from an irate queue, or the management of Ritazza Coffee kicking the door down, presuming that you're shooting up smack.
When I was on my milk round, I used to get the big guns out anywhere and everywhere. Any time I ever felt a squirming twinge of embarrassment about public breastfeeding, I would reason, silently, in my head, to the room at large: "Guys, you either get my tits, or a baby screaming its head off." I always felt that the room would, by a large majority, vote for my tits, and got them out accordingly.
Indeed, when I found out that, when a baby is inward-facing in a Baby Bjorn, you can subtly weasel a breast out, plug the baby in, and walk along, I achieved possibly the ultimate level in lactation casualness.
However, there were quite a few Turkish shopkeepers who would come over for a closer look, going "What a lovely baby! She seems very peac - oh." And then back away slowly.

You're under arrest, Sir Alan

Today we have a guest blog from the novelist Jenny Colgan, whose girl-about-town books cleverly disguise that she's actually a mum of a toddler, with another on the way. Jenny writes about Katie Hopkins turning down Alan Sugar, citing family obligations:

Hang on. For nine weeks, right, we’ve had to listen to Sir Alan Sugar intoning over the credits, ‘This isn’t a game show. This is a job interview’.

Well, so he says. Anyone from the Equal Opportunities Commission watching? Uh, siralun, you’re actually not allowed to allocate jobs based on people’s access to childcare anymore? Since, like, 1976?

Watching the excruciating play-off between Katie, Christina and Simon (who, bless him, looked like he’d turned entirely into water and was draining steadily away into his shoes) on The Apprentice on Wednesday evening was quite extraordinary.

It doesn’t matter if people think Katie’s a snotty hard-nosed bitch (personally I thought she was the series highlight, and that nasty rat fink Tre got off far too lightly).

It doesn’t matter if she says ‘I don’t consider myself a mother’. It doesn’t even matter that she proudly boasted about pulling a married man to have those children. (On her C.V! My God, mine only exaggerates my French 'O' level. Slightly. ), or whether she entered the whole show just to prove she could get to the final. (Surely there are more fun ways to prove yourself, like hand-to-hand tiger fighting, or ritual disembowellment).

But it matters a lot that people could watch that, watch Sir Alan say, ‘So who’s helping you out? Where are your parents? Have you got that sorted out? Will you uproot their lives?” and think that’s an acceptable way to behave in a professional situation.

The only three candidates ever to mention they had children - Ifti, Jadene and Katie - were out straight away. The attitude, personified by Tre, was that kids shouldn’t be getting in the way of business. What a great advertisement for a happy life that is. And as I write, about 110,000 people have already applied to be next year’s Apprentice - well - here's a bit of
advice- DON’T MENTION THE KIDS!!!!

A manny agency

All the signs of summer are here: soft-bodied shirtless hooligans playing football in the park, the reappearance of the one bathing suit that hides tummy bulge. And of course the scramble is on for childcare to cover the weeks when you still have to work but your child is on holiday. In the interest of outdoorsy, fresh-air fun, you could call up a new childcare agency that specialises in mannies - male nannies - who "will take your children for sporty, fun days out with the emphasis being put on healthy holidays." It's all very ruddy-cheeked and vital. The agency was launched an old Etonian, but don't let that put you off. Mannies are supposedly the next great thing in childcare (according to this piece in The Times), right after the Mandarin-speaking au pair and flexible, affordable nurseries with fully-qualified, contented staff who engage in imaginative challenging play. Just kidding about that last one of course. www.themannyagency.co.uk/

Definitely maybe your next nanny?

Bring back the babooshka

Sarah Vine has blogged about Alpha Grannies - grandmothers who are too busy running their own business or organising investment groups to do the whole babysitting and bottles bit. Emma Mahoney, a Times Online family travel writer, has new idea for how grannies should spend their time:

Back in 1986, when I was a teenager studying in Russia, foreigners' hotels had a Babooshka, or Granny figure, sitting behind a desk on every floor. There was nothing on her desk, no books or papers, just her grim face staring at every nervous individual that passed by. "Devooshka!" she would exclaim if I left my hotel room in some dodgy outfit, "It is forbidden to wear a yellow hat! Yellow is for mad people in this country". My father was turned back on one visit as he sheepishly made his way to Red Square in a pair of shorts. Shorts were not suitable for meeting Lenin, embalmed and lying wax-like in the mausoleum, apparently.

More important than the Babooshka's sartorial judgement, was her role as chief busybody. It was her business to nose into everyone's affairs - what they were wearing, what they were carrying, why they were loitering. As teenagers, we would launch major distractions on the Babooshka at the desk so we could carpet crawl into each other's rooms. She would be showered with gifts, flattered but, above all, feared.

Come quick, boys. It's an emergency!

In America, Wisconsin is known for its cheese and its Cheeseheads (fans of the Green Bay Packers sports team). A mother in Wisconsin hasn't done much to elevate the state's reputation: she called 911, the equivalent of 999, to get a babysitter. In this case, the dispatcher persuades the woman that they can't provide this service. But considering how badly my husband and I have needed a night away at times, I wonder if they shouldn't.