I have never had a managerial position, been a boss, or had to hire anyone before – until now. As a mom at home.

We are luckier than some other expats I know who do not have any kind of family nearby; my husband’s parents live within an hour away by car. Since he is their only child and they don’t work (much, anyway), they do have quite a bit of time to help us out when needed and spend time with the kids. But we don’t want to overdo it of course, so like most of you who also want to get out and do something without the kids once in a while, we need a babysitter!

Since we are also fairly new to the area where we bought our house, we don’t have a lot of connections here yet, so where do you start to find a good babysitter, an apparent rare breed?

We had a very responsible and kind 20-year-old babysitter about 1.5 years ago who we used when before my son was born, but she has since needed an actual job (ha) and has headed off for better things, college, etc. We’d found her on the German version of Care.com, a site with reviews and photos. Needless to say, we hit the jackpot on the first try.

Now that my son is also a bit older, it’s time for another, so we put an ad out on ebay classifieds, which is a lot more popular over here for finding what you need! What did we have to lose! If it didn’t work out, we were going to just try the paid website again.

Surprisingly, we actually got many replies within a few days! A few were even people with experience (like a daycare worker, a stay-at-home mom, a guy who works in an institute for disabled and traumatized children, and a few studying early education) – impressive! It all seemed too good to be true!

But then reality set in. Institute Guy seemed to chicken out once we couldn’t immediately find a time to meet him and totally ghosted me despite us bonding initially over his au pair experience in the States. Stay-At-Home Mom may have thought it was too hard to coordinate all of our sick kids or something, who knows, but after she came over and was nice enough, she never replied back after I told her they were sick (and still were a week later). Office Worker Single Gal seemed upbeat when she came over to meet the kids, was eager to play with them, was chatty and requested that I please let her know either way – after I did exactly that she never responded, which makes me wonder if something really did happen to her on her vacation to Morocco immediately after our chat???

So I ask myself, is it a thing now to just ignore people rather than just politely turn them down? Is it a German thing? Is it because it wasn’t conducted through an official portal with pictures and ratings? Did the fact that the kids mostly speak English scare them off? Was there some subtle cultural cue that I was missing?

Being a freelancer for many years as well as being employed at a theater, I have already had lots of experience making things work, coordinating schedules with other busy colleagues, getting along with different personalities, you name it. When planning and communicating in a foreign language, you learn to be direct and clear since there is more room for error or misunderstanding if you are not. Plus, many Germans tend to be very direct anyway, often blunt (which has its pros and cons). So was it all just a coincidence?

We did actually end up finding a shy-ish young lady recently who works at a daycare and wants to study early education soon – she’s just a busy little bee (plays soccer, has several other kids to babysit, has a restaurant gig too I believe, etc), so the search continues for a 2nd sitter who actually has more time when we need her more. Her dad is from England, so she is at least somewhat familiar with English, more than most in this more rural area. The kids like her so far, I heard them giggling when I came home after them being alone with her for the first time. And she actually responds promptly to my messages. And she hasn’t minded sharing information about her or our mutual it’s-Winter-so-we’re-all-sick phenomenon…

So the next round commences, players in the field are: Montenegro Man, Quite Young Occupational Therapist in Training, Nurse, 26-yr-old Unknown but Nice…wish us luck!