Category Archives: Dubai

Silent Sunday: Dubai quirks

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Christmas is one of my favourite times of the year in Dubai, due to the cooler weather and laid-back atmosphere. But, there’s no doubt, it can be a funny thing too. Where else would a festive family fair, with a highly coveted Santa’s grotto for the children, be postponed until the end of January?

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Another quirk I’ve noticed about living in Dubai is that they don’t make waterproof buildings. I guess it rains so infrequently, why bother? But, every now and then, this oversight results in torrents of water gushing down walls and across floors indoors. Check out the leaks that sprung at the new airport during a bout of rain last week – honestly, you have to watch this to believe it!

Spit-mageddon

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Since it rains so infrequently in Dubai, it feels fitting that the events of today’s spit-mageddon are recorded on the blog. Here goes:

6.15am: Wake with an uneasy feeling. There’s a strange darkness creeping round the curtains; I peer out the window and see ominous-looking clouds.

8.15am: The children safely at school, I continue on to work. Suddenly, the sky is split in half by a bolt of lightening. Rain drops start falling.

8.15-8.18am: Spend several minutes trying to locate the windscreen wipers on the car.

9.30am: While the sky is still a pale-grey colour, and the sea looks glassy, the rain appears to have stopped.

10am: Rumours surface that the KHDA, the government body that oversees education, thinks there’s a cyclone coming, and is shutting down all schools, immediately.

10.30am: Rumours confirmed. Schools send text messages to all parents, telling us to pick up our children as soon as possible, by 11.30am at the latest in the case of Son1.

10.30-11am: The evacuation sends all the parents in the office into overdrive. Frantic phone calls are made to car pool buddies and housekeepers. “The children are coming home!”

11.10am: Mothers all over the UAE mobilise their resources and cancel their afternoon engagements. “I was planning on an 11am Ashtanga yoga class, followed by a gellish manicure and a triple berry smoothie at the Lime Tree Cafe,” I imagine inconvenienced yummy-mummies saying. “And the nanny insists on resting in the afternoon.”

11.15am: Manage to get Son1 and Son2 home from different schools, by hook or by crook, without leaving my desk.

11.20am: Yet, despite the dire weather warnings, the sky looks like this:

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Thanks for the photo B! Brightening up outside.

2pm: Texting DH who’s just landed in Melbourne, and three hours after the event, has received the SMS messages from school. “What’s happening?” he asks. “I can’t see anything like a cyclone on the wx map!”

3pm: Still no cyclone. Not even a downpour.

4pm: Will it, won’t it? The rain watch continues.

Rain watch at our office. Just *joking*. We were actually watching the Red Arrows aerobatic team performing loops and rolls above the Burj al-Arab

Raindrop-spotting at our office. Just *joking*. We were actually watching the Red Arrows aerobatic team performing loops and rolls above the Burj al-Arab

6pm: Drive home and hear all about how exciting it was when school closed.

Look at all this rain! Good job the kids were safe at home

Look at all this rain! Good job the kids were safe at home

A shake my head moment

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So I was flicking through our local newspaper, 7Days, and read that police in Abu Dhabi are clamping down on the size of containers on the back of pizza-delivery bikes.

From next month, pizza-delivery boxes must be no bigger than 40cm in length, width and height. Not only that, they must also have no sharp edges and not be made of metal.

The new rules are the result of a series of scrapes and bumps with the capital’s motorists, and will apparently be tightly regulated. New riders must even apply for approval (probably in triplicate, and with passport photos of their grandmother’s budgie) before they can fix a perfectly proportioned delivery box on their motorbike.

I was digesting this news, and imagining police in Lamborghini Aventadors with measuring tape, chasing down moped riders with oversized containers stuffed full of pizza, when another headline caught my eye.

Although just an idea at the moment, the head of Dubai Traffic Police has proposed a superhighway linking UAE cities on which drivers with flashy cars could travel at 200 KILOMETRES AN HOUR.

OMG! A study is even promised to see if such a road would be feasible. I mentally checked to see if it was April 1st, then decided they must have read the recent satirical story in the The Pan-Arabia Enquirer – on a gold-class lane between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, cordoned off with a red velvet rope – and thought, “What a splendid idea; that’ll make sure all those dusty Lancers, Corollas and pizza-delivery bikes don’t hold anyone up.”

Somehow, I don’t think the UAE is ready for an Autobahn just yet.

Do you?

"Awesome idea," said 24-year-old petrolhead Marcus McGrath, a salesman who owns an Audi R8 sports car. "I speed anyway. This would mean I could do it in a safer way." UGHHHHH!

“Awesome idea,” said 24-year-old petrolhead Marcus McGrath, a salesman who owns an Audi R8 sports car. “I speed anyway. This would mean I could do it in a safer way.” UGHHHHH, am speechless! PHOTO from 7DAYS

The verb hunt

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A new policy I’m trying to adhere to is to leave work on time. Often harder than it sounds, the reason for this is two-fold: the traffic in Dubai is abysmal (again), and my children have seemingly endless homework that needs supervising.

Tonight, I came through the door and called out my usual ‘hellos’. Son2 leapt up from his chair at the kitchen table and ran at me like a torpedo, while Son1 peered at me from behind the iPad, shouted hello loudly, then went back to his game like a techno-crackhead.

“Right,” I said brightly. “Who’s got homework?” I knew they both had work to do; and they both knew I knew. There was silence. Son1 sank deeper into the sofa, and Son2 actually went back to the kitchen table to eat vegetables.

“It’s verbs tonight, isn’t it?” I said, rubbing my hands with glee.

Yes, glee!

You might be surprised to hear that, perhaps oddly for someone who writes a blog, works on a magazine and LOVES writing, I don’t actually know one end of a sentence from the other. A product of the 70s, I learned (learnt?) to read and write at a time when grammar was totally out of fashion.

Back then, British schools were going through a period in which the teaching of grammar was thought to be stifling to creativity (or maybe I spent my childhood staring out the window? It’s possible).

1374281_658095677542759_1305527163_nInstead, I sort of feel my way through a piece of writing – in the same way you’d produce a watercolour painting, I can put together the bare bones of an article, flesh it out and add some detail. A read-through at the end, along with a flurry of fairly brutal editing, polishes it off, and, voila, I’m done.

But ask me about sentence construction, the future perfect or irregular verbs and I’m at a bit of a loss really. If something is wrong, it literally jumps off the page at me – and I can usually fix it (which is what I do in my job as a sub editor), but I couldn’t give you a technical explanation.

Which is why I’m loving the fact that my older son is actually starting to learn all this stuff at school – not only can I refresh my own knowledge, but I can honestly say that witnessing him starting to grasp grammar is a joy.

Until I take it a bit too far. “A verb hunt. Great!” I enthused. “Let’s go through my magazines,” I suggested, and reached for a copy of the business title I work on.

“Now then, tell me, where is the verb in this headline?” I asked him.

Son 1 looked at the page, blankly. He tried, bless him. But it was a story on Iraq, aimed at oil executives, not seven year olds.

“Mum,” he said, quietly. “I really want to do the other homework. The 3D model of a landform.”

They’re going to the planetarium tomorrow, as part of their unit of inquiry on how the Earth works, and he’s so excited.

“Can we make an iceberg, like in the Titanic?” he pleaded.

Grammar was never going to compete, was it?

The division of labour

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I’m enjoying a few days off from the office this week, and as well as catching up on a million things, I’m trying to squeeze a couple of friends in – and I do mean squeeze, quite literally.

A dear buddy I caught up with this morning has recently started a new job, which, as we all know, is a time-consuming beast. With both of us attempting to juggle work and kids, a meet-up was proving elusive – until, all of a sudden, a window of opportunity arose.

“I can do Tuesday morning, after drop-off,” she texted.

“But only until 9.”

“That’s great,” I replied. “We’ll talk fast.”

Remember how, pre-kids, meeting friends involved leisurely lunches and shopping bags? Now we're all caught up by 9am!

Remember how, pre-kids, meeting friends involved leisurely lunches and shopping bags? Now we’re all caught up and on our way by 9am!

And talk fast we did, over eggs benedict and tea, in a frilly restaurant that resembles the inside of a doll’s house, near school.

This lovely friend has children who are a few years older than my own and is a font of information about the myriad issues that arise. I was picking her brains about homework – when will they do it without me breathing down their necks? How much per night? When, oh when, does it get easier?

And why does the homework buck seem to stop squarely on the woman’s shoulders?

“It’s like a government,” she suggested. “I’m the Ministry of Education and the Department of Health. He’s the Ministry of Transport.”

It made perfect sense, put like that.

“He’s also the Chancellor of the Exchequer,” she continued.

And, when you think about it, there’s more: Food Standards Agency (me); Revenues and Customs (him); Archives Department (me); Department for Environment (me); Treasury (him); Ministry of Justice (shared, though DH is better at breaking up the boys’ fights than me); General Secretariat (me); Ministry of Social Affairs (me); Foreign Office (him); Ministry of Labour (depends what kind of labour you’re talking about). I could go on.

But as for the homework, we concurred – it’s, unfortunately, one of those pink jobs – which, given that my worker bees aren’t exactly cooperative, merits a big sigh.

The morning after (the night before)

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If there’s a time when our living room resembles a scene from the movie The Hangover, it’s the Friday morning after Halloween.

I came downstairs today to find sweet wrappers strewn around the lounge, several containing half-eaten, sticky candies. Discarded costumes were still in the exact spot they’d been peeled off, and the children, who’d got up far too early considering it was such a late night, were sprawled on the sofa, pale-faced with tiredness and nursing sugar hangovers. If a chicken had wandered by, and pecked at the leftover sweets, I honestly wouldn’t have been too surprised.

Closer inspection revealed that the disembodied neck from Son 1’s headless horseman outfit had rolled across the floor, coming to rest by the TV. I spotted a gloved hand from Son 2’s zombie costume nearby and there was a devil’s fork propped against the bookshelf.

“So everyone had a good night then?” I asked, looking at my bleary-eyed, 7YO Halloweenie, who was holding his head in his hands. (A cold was compounding the sugar crash).

There was a resounding yes – and, I have to say, I did feel quite pleased that our preparations (which, let’s face it, take all month) had paid off.

I love that, on Halloween, our compound descends into collective trick-or-treatery and becomes a distant satellite suburb of the US, with spooky decorations galore. Last night, our wonderful American neighbours treated us to a pre-Halloween warm-up party; then the kids trooped round the streets in costume – gathering in porches lit by the glow of jack-o-lanterns to collect sweets.

Some villas had taken a theatrical approach, with haunted-house music and torches, and there was a witch strung high above G street, flapping gently in the moonlight.

It was a balmy evening, almost a little too hot to be wearing layers of cheap polyester, and our community was out in force – on foot and for a lucky few, drive-by style, in a six-foot trailer pulled by a quad bike.

After the commotion died down, I escaped to a party up the road, leaving DH to get the children to bed, and bringing Halloween to a wickedly fun end.

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The costumes were acquired by DH on a trip to New York earlier in October

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The pumpkin was bought at the fruit n veg market (12dhs, as opposed to the fortune charged by Spinney’s) and the innards were turned into this dish – my first ever pumpkin pie! We carved a watermelon too, which glowed luminous red

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Just some more e-numbers – spider cakes for the children

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But for some, Halloween is as easy as writing a (polite) note and posting it on the door (although they probably had to hide too)

You might also like: Halloween in the desert; Halloween in the hood

When customer service thinks for you

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So DH and I are at our local retail centre having a breakfast date when my phone rings. It’s the receptionist at a dental clinic in Healthcare City.

“You have appointment,” she says in a sing-song voice. “Wednesda-ay, 9.30 in the morn-ing.”

“That’s right,” I reply. “You phoned yesterday to confirm,” I add, a little confused because it was a fait accompli as far as I was concerned. I wonder if she’s about to tell me the slot’s cancelled and I need to reschedule.

There’s a pause. “Yes, Ma’am,” she says. “I’ll phone you again on Tuesday to remind you.”

“You could just text me if you like,” I suggest. “I’ve written it down.”

I’d have thought nothing more of it, but 10 minutes later, we encounter another circular conversation that suggests we left our brains at passport control.

DH and I go into the supermarket to buy our helper Catherine some lunch from the deli section. They sell Filipino food and we often bring it home for her.

"Sir, no. You want pizza, yes!"

“Sir, you prefer pizza, yes!”

“What’s that?” DH asks, pointing at a vegetable dish.

“You won’t like,” says the man behind the counter, shaking his head.

DH tries again. “But can you tell me what it is?”

“It’s Filipino food.”

“Could I have some please?” attempts DH.

“You no like,” he repeats, adamant.

“If you want, you must try first,” he then adds, helpfully. So DH does the taste test and smiles in approval. “Mmmm, yum.”

Still a little unconvinced, the man reluctantly spoons some of the dish into a small pot – filling it only half full.

We make it to the cash register, and I wonder if receptionists and deli counter staff are actually on a mission to save us from ourselves. You never know – customer service in Dubai can be a strange thing.

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Doggy daycare

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Son 1 attended a 007, spy-themed party at the Ranches this weekend and as I drove through the rabbit warren of streets lined with beautiful identikit villas to collect him, it occurred to me that I might not know any of the other parents.

He’s on a school bus, so I have much less contact with his school than my other son’s (higher-maintenance) school, which I visit every day for the drop-off. Plus, the way they do a shake, rattle and roll each year with the six classes in each grade means both the pupils and parents get a fresh start each September.

Anyway, the party was still going on, so the parents huddled in the kitchen while a pair of energetic teenagers led the games outside. I struck up a conversation with another British mum, as the kids hurled water bombs at each other, and we exchanged details about our child’s name, class, etc.

(The drawback with mixing up the classes is I spend ages wracking my not-so-well-oiled brain, trying to work out if the mum I’m talking to is the same person I sat giggling with in a coffee shop three years ago, is the class mum – who deserves deep respect, in my opinion, and I probably owe money to – or is indeed a newcomer.)

The British lady and I didn’t talk about our children for long, because the conversation quickly moved on to her dogs. Specifically, the doggy daycare they were being treated to that day. Yes, treated to.

“Do you want to see some photos of my dogs?” she asked, rhetorically, then reached for her phone, pulled up Facebook and clicked on a post from the doggy daycare.

“There they are,” she said proudly. “Awww, look what they’re doing!”

"The masseuse is here, Sir"

“The masseuse is here, Sir”

I peered at her phone. Her dogs, indeed very cute (and known as Little and Large, due to one being big and the other handbag-sized), were pictured frolicking around a sizeable grassy, landscaped yard, with tunnels and other playthings laid out for them.

“That’s their swimming pool,” she said, enlarging a photo of a sparkling blue pool, big enough to hold at least 10 children.

“Swimming pool?” I responded, my eyes widening, “For the dogs?”

“Yes, and that’s where they rest. It’s great – they go every Saturday.” [“Means we can actually do something on Saturdays,” her husband interjected.] “In fact, we must dash – it’s doggy pick-up time at 6.”

She showed me one last photo of her cat [“Do they do cat daycare, too?” I ventured, my mind still processing this whole concept and spinning with possibilities for our moggy.] Then they called their daughter over to leave.

I’m not really a dog person, but later that evening, I found myself Googling it, intrigued by the idea of a pet daycare with a pool, that structures the day to include a dog-nap, has a webcam trained on the playarea, and posts updates on Facebook to allow ‘parents’ to see what their pampered pets are up to.

Turns out, that’s not the half of it. Dogs can board there, and even the standard suites are furnished with a sofa bed and plasma TV; the Urban Suite has a webcam inside; and the Junior Royal Suite offers extras such as a sheepskin rug, bonus cuddles, caviar in the feeding bowls and champagne through a hose (ok, I made the last two up!).

There’s a pet Limo service, a personal butler and a fully-equipped indoor gym with ‘Fit Fur Life’ doggy treadmills – where, I’m guessing, the doggy bootcamp for overweight pooches takes place.

You won’t be surprised to learn that classical music is piped into the communal areas and that eye-soothing views of an indoor oasis with fabulous fountains are advertised.

Seriously, I’ve been in Dubai for five years now and I thought I’d seen it all. But a 7-star pet resort for animals who need a luxury break from their day-to-day routine. That takes the biscuit, surely!

(And, yes, there is a cattery – I checked!)

Find out more about Urban Tails (in the Green Community) at www.urbantailsdubai.com

On being time poor

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“There just aren’t enough hours in the day,” I sighed, before flopping down on the sofa to waste the last hour or so before bed on my Twitter feed. It’s about all I can manage after a day spent cramming in a school run, a commute through heavy Dubai traffic, eight hours of work, dinner and the bedtime shenanigans.

When I watch my children, the thing that really strikes me is they have all.the.time.in.the.world. It’s just not an issue; time is laid out ahead of them like the toilet roll in the Andrex puppy-dog advert – it might undulate and unravel in bursts, but the hours in their day, the days in their week, and the months in their year, are long, seemingly never-ending stretches of glorious time.

At school drop-off, with just minutes to go before the classroom doors slide shut, my younger son can sit rooted to his seat in an indignant protest at me trying to rush him out of the car. He has time to dwardle on the walk in – if there were roses, I’m sure he’d stop to smell them.

Stop the clock! Time thief, be gone

Stop the clock! Time thief, be gone

At the other end of the day, when I have to wrestle homework out of them, the time gods smile on their scowly sweet faces again, and bestow bonus minutes on them. My older son will lose the pencil, break the pencil, need the toilet, suddenly become parched with thirst, and, the one that really irks me, just need five more minutes to finish watching something before starting.

To say they don’t have a sense of urgency is an understatement.

Except time is deceptive. I know that, because somewhere along the way – I think starting in your 20s – time suddenly seems to speed up. So that, by the time you reach your 40s, it’s picked up such a pace that life starts passing, literally, in a blur. I can even find myself coming out in a cold sweat, worried that it’ll suddenly fast-forward another decade in the blink of an eye. (Like it did in my 30s – the ‘lost’ decade of pregnancies, sleepless nights, bottles and nappies.)

“One day,” my mother warned the time-rich, whinging 8-year-old me, “you’ll wish you could be bored again,” she said, sagely. And, you know what, she was right.

Enjoy it kids, before the time thief catches up with you too.

Meet the granny au pairs

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It’s a divisive issue that newcomers to the Middle East soon encounter: ‘Should we or shouldn’t we hire a helper?’ ‘Won’t it feel weird having someone living in our house?’ And, after a prolonged search for someone reliable, ‘Have I developed maid envy?’

For some cultures, whether to hire help at home is a no-brainer. They grew up with live-in staff and fully intend to carry on that tradition. In other families, both parents might be working and an extra pair of hands around the house is an essential cog in the wheel – the glue that keeps the family, with all its comings and goings, functioning.

I wonder how long until she gives in

I wonder how long until she caves in

For others, it’s a complicated decision that often starts with resistance (‘I didn’t have help at home, why should I need it here?’), becomes a grey area where you’ve warmed to the idea (husband’s travelling, baby has colic, school run takes two hours, family are 8,000 miles away), then ends with a full-on, wide-scale search for the right fit for your family.

And, personally, I don’t believe that those who choose to hire a live-in helper do so simply because it’s much cheaper out here and they’d rather be in the salon or handbag shopping.

The decision is usually based on the need for back-up and the realisation that society in the UAE is geared towards having domestic help. (Gyms with childcare facilities – forget it. The assumption is you’ll leave your child at home with the nanny. And a nursery that DOESN’T run on a school-term system with lengthy shut downs for holidays – unlikely. You’ll have to fork out for camp for your tot if you need holidays covered.)

Of course, every family is different, and many expats in the UAE survive perfectly well under their own steam, but if you did want to hire a live-in helper, what are the options? Here are three ways you can outsource some of the countless tasks that keep a family happy, healthy and smiling.

A live-in maid, who helps with the housework and children: Invariably from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Ethiopia or India, a housemaid is a popular choice, despite the fact she’s unlikely to have any childcare qualifications. She’ll need to be sponsored by the head of your family (which means assuming responsibility for her), but if you hire someone whose personality you like, who knows when to take the initiative and when to step back, and is liked by your children, this arrangement can be wonderfully beneficial, for both you and her. Find out more about hiring a housemaid at ExpatWoman’s Maids in Dubai section.

A pampered housekeeper: She’s worked as a housemaid-come-nanny in Dubai for a while, in the Marina or somewhere in the Ranches, and expects perks, from flat-screen TVs to satellite packages, use of the pool, a blind-eye to her boyfriend, Wi-Fi and travel on a national carrier like Emirates rather than a budget airline. When you respond to her ad, she’ll interview you, bringing the conversation to an abrupt end if you reveal you have more than two children.

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Reinventing the au pair: Sonja Franke is a Dubai ‘granny’

A granny au pair: An au pair with a similar background to you might sound like the ideal solution if you’re looking for someone to care for your children while you’re at work. Add the ingredients of age and experience to this female export and your family life could be transformed by a caring, grandmotherly figure.

I didn’t even realise this was a possibility out here, but there’s a German agency that’s providing families all over the world, including the UAE, with mature au pairs, aged between 50 and 70. Many are women who have brought up families of their own and are now keen to travel or learn another language.

It’s a win-win situation for both sides, as the idea of an au pair is based on mutual help. The granny helps with housekeeping and children, and gets free board and lodging in return.

Older women are usually better than younger au pairs because they have more experience of life, says Michaela Hansen, founder of Hamburg’s Granny Au Pair agency. “Families like to take them on because they are reliable, serious and know how to be strict.”

CASE STUDY: “We had fun together in the Range Rover, even in traffic jams”

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After nine months as an au pair in Switzerland, Evelyn jumped at the chance to make Dubai her next stop

Granny au pair Evelyn Eis spent four months in Dubai earlier this year, living with a German family with two boys, aged two and four, in Nadd Al Hamer.

The emirate had long been a source of fascination to Evelyn, making an au pair placement in the UAE a dream come true. “I’ve always been interested in Dubai – a whole new world to me, with its great architectural buildings, warm air and sea, and Arab culture,” she told Circles in the Sand. “I wanted to get to know the emirate better – for myself, rather than hearing about it in the media.

“I had the good fortune to be placed with a kindly German family with two lovable boys. The area in which they live is predominantly local and when I did my buggy walks each morning, people would stop their car and offer me a lift. They weren’t used to seeing an older woman with a child walking the streets and it was so nice to meet such kind locals who wanted to drive me!

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Footie in the park

“I also met men and women from the community at the beautiful neighbourhood park. The women let me see their faces when speaking to me and sometimes we’d arrange to meet the next day. I was invited to visit them in their villas and was introduced to other members of their families, while my two boys played with their children in their house and garden.

“Every day, I’d drive the older boy to school in the morning and pick him up at 2pm. (The younger boy was, in the meantime, with the Indian housemaid.) In the afternoons, I’d take both boys to various activities, ie, football or swimming and, once a week, to meet other German children and their mothers at one of the city’s many parks. The different meeting places were not easy to find, even with a sat-nav. I’d drive between 20-40km just to get there in ‘my’ great-big Range Rover. But the boys were always happy with me in the car, because we had fun together, even in traffic jams. I miss them now!”

Families looking for a ‘Granny’ are encouraged to contact Granny Aupair at info@granny-aupair.com. More about the service can be found at www.granny-aupair.com