Dear Au Pair,

Our four kids will be 7, 6, 3 and 1.5 in October 2024. The older kids go to school/day-care in the mornings and one of us and sometimes both of us (plus often grand-parents) are with them in the afternoons. Tobi works as a teacher and I (Lisa) am a stay at home mum at the moment while the kids are young (until 2020 I also worked as a teacher and will again when the kids are a bit older). We mostly need you to be there as back-up for when the kids are ill (someone is always ill between November and March...) entertain the toddler some mornings, support us generally and enable us to have the odd couple's time. But be sure to know that we always make sure that you don't have to work more than your 30 hours a week and 6 hours a day (our last au pair will be happy to let you know all about us).

Lisa is a vegetarian and Tobi is a hunter so we will often eat vegetarian meals but also meat sometimes. This also goes to show that we're pretty tolerant. You should be okay with not eating meat on a daily basis because I don't like buying meat at the supermarket. Other than that we love gardening, singing and hiking and we enjoy watching series on the internet.

We live in a small village close to the city of Göttingen (15 min drive) in a house with our cat (so you would have to like or at least tolerate them) and a couple of chickens in the garden (plus maybe some rabbits by then - Leona would so love to have some). Our village is 5 km from the town of Northeim where you can do basic shopping, take language classes, go to the movies or restaurants and so on. Everything else can be done in Göttingen.

Since Lisa is half Australian, we bring up our kids bilingual. That means that we speak English when we're amongst ourselves and German in social situations. Therefore you would be required to speak English or German with the kids but you could also improve your German in any social situation and you can attend a language course in Northeim or Göttingen if you want to.

You definitely need a driver's licence to get anywhere here. You will get to drive your own car while you're with us (we pay insurance, taxes and fuel for kid-related chores and your language class and you just pay fuel for any private excursions you may want to use it for). The car is a manual car though, so please only contact us if you know how to drive a manual car. You could also come to stay with us without a driver's licence, however, then you would be limited to online language classes because the bus doesn't run in the evening and we don't want to have to drive you around.

Your job will be mostly to play with the kids in the afternoons, sometimes take care of the toddler in the mornings and at other times take the older kids to school/day-care and/or pick them up (even though I do a lot of that and just need some back-up for ill kids that I don't want to have to take anywhere). Of course you will also be required to do some general household duties like cleaning up the table and clearing out the dishwasher and so on and some babysitting at night occasionally.

If all that suits you, please don't hesitate to contact us. We are looking forward to getting to know you!

Plus ⇩