On-screen text reading “Au Pair’s Arrival” sits over a bedroom with a bubble glass chandelier and a bed piled with cushions. Amy Polwarth, who posts as @amypolwarth, stands at the foot of the bed and says her family is getting its very first au pair on Friday and that this will be her room. Her caption labels the video “PART ONE | AU PAIR JOURNEY” and asks viewers to comment ideas for making the new arrival feel at home.
The room has a problem she names right away: they have been using it as a storage unit, so everything has to come out before it can be set up “to be all special” for the arrival. She says she loves the existing linen bedding but does not think linen is the most comfortable thing to sleep in, so she plans to put bamboo sheets on the bed instead.
She then walks through the doorway to show what comes with the room: a walk in bathroom with a shower and toilet, and a walk in closet, all described as the au pair’s very own. She says she has just had the house professionally cleaned and has had her car cleaned too, because the two of them will share a car at first and they will reassess later whether the au pair needs her own.
A small detail follows. She has told the au pair not to bring any hair tools, because she has “a million” from previous brand collaborations. She kneels in the bathroom and lays out a hair waver, a straightener, a curler and an automatic curler, so, as she puts it, “she has options.”
The closet is the setback. She says she asked someone in the house to clean it out and it is still full of stuff, so she packs everything up herself. The video then cuts to a grocery store, where she says she is picking up the things the au pair told her she likes to eat, so they are there when she arrives. The last frames show a cart stacked with snack boxes. She closes by saying there is another big day tomorrow and asks viewers to follow along. The video does not show the arrival itself, so how it goes is not in this installment.
The video does not say which program the family is using, so the following applies only if the au pair comes through the U.S. State Department’s J-1 au pair program. Under federal regulation 22 CFR 62.31, a sponsor may not place an au pair with a family that cannot provide a suitable private bedroom, which is why a room that has been serving as storage matters. The same rule caps the au pair’s child care at 10 hours a day and 45 hours a week, requires at least one and one half days off each week plus one complete weekend off each month, and provides two weeks of paid vacation. It also requires the local counselor to contact the host family and au pair within 48 hours of arrival and to meet them in person within two weeks. Read the full section before you sign on to any arrangement.
If you are preparing a room for a live in helper, the order shown here is the one to copy. Empty the room before anything else, since the part she did not finish was the closet. Put the bedding you actually want to sleep in on the bed. Decide the car question before the arrival and say out loud that it will be revisited, as she does. And ask what the person likes to eat instead of guessing, which is how her cart ended up with the snacks it has. If the room is going to double as the person’s private space, check that it meets your program’s bedroom requirement before the day they land.
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