The short version:
We won’t be using the nanny we were using for our kids anymore. We want to give her something to mark how happy we are with her. How much (or what) should we give her?. She was paid $80 a week. She helped us for just over two years.
The long version:
There is this lady who has been taking care of our kids. We took them to their home while my wife was at work and I was, er, well, that depends on when we are talking about. About 8 hours a day, on the average.
We are very pleased with them, and the only reason our kids won’t be going there is that the boy (3) is starting school and the girl (2) will now stay at home with me since we decided it wasn’t worth the heartache for me to keep getting crappy jobs.
We are keeping an option to send the girl there twice a week (for me to run insane errands on government offices and the like), but the main motivation for that is to weane them slowly from the income that caring for our kids meant for them.
She is a stay at home 30-something who is, well, let’s say unmarriable and unemployable although a professional wouldn’t diagnose her with anything that made her elligible for disability. She lives with her parents and her sisters all live in houses built in the same lot and all the families eat together. They all live on welfare.
This meant that she was always paid under the table, of course, and has nothing anywhere similar to benefits or social security. We paid her $80 a week. When you convert this to an hourly rate it is only half a step above slavery, I know. This is still after about a 50% increase from what she asked for, after some extras and bonuses we have invented over this time. We agreed to give her $30 a week now that it will be just the girl, and only twice a week.
They are wonderful people and somehow related to my MIL. They have taken excellent care of our kids for just over two years. The kids just love them all and call her parents “grandpa” and “grandma”. If we ever go on vacations, they get all soft about not seeing them for too long. They are really special. I can’t imagine what this time would have been like if we hadn’t arranged our kids care with them.
We plan to keep contact with them and make sure the kids don’t ever forget the people who practically raised them.
We really want to do something special for them, now that the kids won’t be spending their days there. We are not made of money, though.
Our Christmas bonus has always been about a month’s pay ($300 or so. ETA: which she mostly spent on presents for us :rolleyes: ) and we normally give her $100 and a little something for her birthday and mother’s day. We still paid her even if we didn’t take the kids there because of vacations or whatever.
What is appropriate to give her/them?