Warning! This article is – against the spirit of the Baby Blog – very negative. But all true.
The houseswap in the Bay Area did not work out as planned. Instead of sharing the house with one very quiet person, who is hardly ever there, never leaves her room… we found 3 people, 2 sisters and a little boy, living there, obviously very inconvenienced by our stay. They had a few – heavily tatooed and shaven-head – friends on Sunday night. My immediate call to their dad changed things a little, but mostly shifted hostilities underground: Tablecloth down, tablecloth up and other un-babyproofing games…, 3 loads of laundry a day, each soaking for hours…, heater thermostat cover removed, and heater turned off 4-5 times the 2 mornings when I bathed the baby until the temperature was at least around 20C / 65F… (I gave up trying most other days.) In the end it was turned off at the funace and we had to call their dad again… We had to clean up after ourselves (and after the baby) all the times, no matter how inconvenient, otherwise we found our stuff in the playpen… we had their car only for 5 days instead of the whole stay… also there were lots of toy weapons of every kind and lots of books on guns…. I guess that their mother cleans up after them, I’m not much of a housewife and it just bugs me to have to take out the overflowing trash every day (OK Andy did that most the time), do everybody’s dishes… I am not sure if we’ll ever do a houseswap again, but if we will we will research much better, and certainly insist that nobody else is in the house, not even occcasionally. At least the parents seemed nice enough, and they left our house clean and as they found it.
[End of Rant]
When house swapping with a baby it is extremely important to have privacy, private space, and the ability to spread out, and that’s just not compatible with roommates.
