"tu sais que tout le monde te deteste"

Last Tuesday, the 5 year old told me that he loved me a little more than his mom and a lot more than his dad and the 8 year old gave me a necklace that took him two days to make.

The day before that, the 5 year old looked up at me with his red, tired eyes and fingers blue from trying to make a rubber band bracelet and said in French, "you know that everyone hates you," and the 8 year old looked at me at the dinner table and said in French, "you can't even speak French. You're not even close to being French" and wouldn't let me help him with his homework because he told his mom I would mess it up.

A day or two after, the 5 year old looked at me and said, "Well, we're twins, you and I, and twins never fight with each other" as he wrapped his arms around me and gave me a big, slobbery, juice-filled mouth of a 5-year-old kiss and the 8 year old bought me a piece of candy from the bodega downstairs.

Sure, being an au-pair is being a babysitter that speaks another language. But it's also being constantly exhausted and usually frustrated, until one day you realize that it's April, and that time is flying by. You start to wonder how you can fit everything that you want to do with the kids into the last 4 months and how you'll ever say goodbye to the amazing, funny, wonderful, sweet, exhausting children that you see every day and have come to love; and then a flying Lego and the sound of muffled screams from under a pillow snap you out of it and you have to go break up another fight over the only working set of Lego wheels left in the apartment.