Long post, apologies in advance. Badly need to get this off my chest.
Some of you may be familiar with my AP saga. We've had a lot of APs over the years, some good, some ad, some indifferent.
Basically the current one is a nice enough lass of 21, who has been with me since November, and was at university doing a biology degree last academic year, but often very inefficient, and had to be dealt with by the agency early on for only doing what she felt like doing when she felt like doing it, resulting in minor but persistent domestic chaos which was driving me nuts. There has been some improvement in key areas since then but there are still problems.
Background is I am having a fourth baby in 5 weeks, have bad SPD, and am very very tired, so need a reasonable level of domestic support.
Recent misdemeanours have included failing to come home at the time she is supposed to, because she felt like taking DS2 (7) to the shops and library spontaneously, so DS1 (11) came home to an empty house after school and panicked and went back to school in tears, causing a major incident with the Deputy Head phoning me etc (I was at the hospital for an appointment). I carpeted her for that, and told her if it ever happened again she would be on the next plane back home because the children's safety was paramount. I noticed a more minor repeat of the incident happened on DH's watch a couple of weeks ago, but he is a bit of a softy, and didn't tell her off like I did.
There's a lot more stuff as well. I was in the kitchen last night and noticed the oven door was looking grubby, so went over to give it a quick wipe. The back story here is that I have just had Ovenu in to completely overhaul it at a cost of £120, because the AP had not been wiping it after spilling things and it had got into a right state. I had explained to her the need to wipe up after yourself when using ovens, otherwise the fat etc all bakes on and then makes the thing impossible to use (which she had originally been complaining about). When I opened the oven door I could see that she can't have wiped it once since the bloke came, because it was caked in dirt and grease, the Lakeland teflon liner at the bottom had spilled fat all over it and was so grimy and greasy it could hardly be removed from the oven floor, and there was a tray of charred cooked food from the end of last week sitting there in pride of place on the middle shelf. Ugh.
I started cleaning up after her using my Lakeland oven chemicals, such was the state of the thing, but it soon became clear that she had let it go to the point where it needed the man to come in again after only 4 weeks of relatively light use. You should know that it was very painful for me to scrub away at the oven with my hips in the state they are in, and also I cannot cook myself at the moment because I can't lift the hot dishes.
She also has been taking 8-10 hours to fold the washing and do the ironing each week, a job which has taken other APs up to 4 hours and takes me 2 in my normal fit state, and spends a lot of time hiding in the utility room doing this, but failing to help the children with their homework and music practice, which is what she is supposed to be doing between 4-5 each day. I try to help the kids as well but the painkilling drugs I am on mean I can be quite out of it sometimes at this time of day, and this is very hard. The laundry backlog got particularly huge last week and I found DH in there late one evening trying to finish off the pairing of socks, folding of school polo shirts and so on from the mountain, but he works a 60-70 hour week and frankly I do not think he should have to do this.
Similarly I showed her how to clean the kids' room and shower room a couple of times (the only cleaning she is supposed to do apart from wiping up after herself), but she has reverted to that thing APs do where they just do a bit of token dusting and hoovering in the easy areas, leaving the ornaments, tops of shelves and so on. We now have a situation in which the window frame is literally black with mould, a problem as we are all allergic to mould spores here. She has not wiped the window once, that means. You can also draw in the dust.
I have just sat her down and told her she has to start doing all her jobs properly and thoroughly, and is on two weeks' notice to improve otherwise we will have to review whether she stays at all. She did a bit of a poor little girl act (she is good at that, particularly with DH) but I just told her to pull her socks up and give us the help we need and are paying for, not what she can be bothered to do. This means she may well give notice herself leaving me stranded just before the birth, and rather rueing having paid an agency £400 to provide us with her last November, but I am thinking I probably can't go on picking up the pieces after her.
Has anyone else had problems like this, and what was the resolution??
Also any supportive murmurings badly needed here.