Whether or not you're in a romantic relationship, Valentine's Day is the one day of the year completely dedicated to all things lovey-dovey and touchy-feely. But, as the holiday has gotten more and more commercialized, some people find that it's more enjoyable to celebrate with those they love on a day other than February 14th. Read on for my tips on having a love-filled Valentine's Day, either on the holiday itself or on an alternate date, and for fun tips on having a low-key love-fest with friends and family.

Restaurants

It's no secret that service is generally worse on holidays like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and New Year's Eve than it is on a regular night. Restaurants scurry to pack in as many reservations as possible, overwhelming the staff in both the front and back of the house, adding insult to injury for workers who may feel slightly resentful of having to give up their own celebrations already. If you do decide to dine out on Valentine's Day, be patient and tip well. And, if you decide to postpone, try rescheduling dinner on a Tuesday night. For fine dining "treat" restaurants especially, which are generally closed on Sundays and Mondays, Tuesdays are the least-crowded night of the week and also the best night of the week for service: the food and the staff are both at their freshest.

Finding Care

If you decide to celebrate Valentine's Day away from home, either with dinner and a movie or a romantic weekend getaway, it's best to look for babysitters and pet sitters well in advance. Like restaurant reservations, caregivers tend to book up fast and early. Use Care.com to post a job for your care needs today. Also, as with my restaurant tips above, you may want to pay your sitter a premium rate for working on the holiday, or do something nice like give them flowers and leave fun, festive activities for them to enjoy with your kids (on you, of course). Renting a sentimental movie appropriate for all ages, or leaving a stipend for bowling or ice cream, is a great idea.

Family Fun Fest

On most days, let alone Valentine's Day, keeping it simple often makes for the best family fun--especially with kids. Here are some great ideas for celebrating Valentine's Day at home:

• Start the day off with a special breakfast. Pick up inexpensive themed paper plates and napkins (or just plain old red leftovers from Christmas). Give each kid (big or little) a little something to tell them you love them and just how special they are to you, like a little stuffed animal or a card with a sweet note inside.

• If you're planning ahead (and feeling ambitious), you can make great custom placemats online and have them shipped directly to you. The Care.com editors love the ones at OliveKids.com.

• Kids get a kick out of food coloring, so make pink pancakes or waffles for breakfast! If you happen to have a heart-shaped mold or iron, great—but don't underestimate the power of plain old food coloring. Feeling inspired now? Pick up heart-themed bakeware at SurLaTable.com or at your local Home Goods store and let the theme carry on to brownies, red velvet cakes, and more sweet treats.

• For more crafty fun, kids can make simple Valentine's Day cards for grandparents with red construction paper and simple stickers. Or, for older kids, make a "photo frame" card with heavier card stock cut to frame a wallet-sized school photo. Tape or glue the photo inside the "mat" and then cut a piece of construction paper the size of the card to glue on the photo back to hold it in place.

• Create festive cards with the kids online at photo-sharing sites like Shutterfly.com and KodakGallery.com. Both sites offer greeting card templates you can customize at affordable prices every day.

Playing Cupid

Even if you're single, there are lots of ways you can give and receive love on Valentine's Day:

• Send cards, flowers, or homemade goodies to grandparents and far-flung relatives, or surprise them with a phone call just to tell them you're thinking of them.

• Call to volunteer at a local nursing home, women's shelter, or animal shelter, offering company, compassion, or cooking skills to those in need.

• Treat another single friend to a movie night, coffee, bowling, shopping, or another activity to show them how much you appreciate their special place in your life.

• Like you did in grade school, buy a box of Valentine's Day cards and individually wrapped candies at the supermarket and pass them out to friends or even co-workers.

Have a great tip for celebrating the holiday? Share it with the Care.com community by posting a comment!

Happy Valentine's Day,

Sheila

You just got your child's grades, and they don't look good. It's only mid-year and there's still time to turn things around, but maybe you don't have resources in your area or the budget for a tutor. There's hope. The National Education Association offers this guide for parents, or you can follow these simple steps to work with your child at home:

• Proctor homework time.
  According to the NEA and other sources, kids perform better in school when their parents are actively involved in their learning. Turn off the TV after dinner and make homework time a family affair. Maybe you and your spouse (or the sitter / nanny, or grandma) can take turns. Bring your own work or reading and set up a rigid study period at the dining room table. Being available will make your kids feel more comfortable approaching you with questions and asking for your help, and participating helps create structure.

• Work with teachers.
  Call your child's teacher and ask for a copy of the syllabus / curriculum outline. Ask the teacher for insight into your child's in-class strengths and weaknesses so you know what areas to work on first. Make sure to check in with your child after all major assignments and tests, ask them how they felt and how they think they did, and then review the corrected papers or exams with them.

• Buy the Teacher's Edition.
  Check out Textbooks.com or Amazon.com to purchase the solutions or answer key and teacher's edition of your child's textbooks. After working through homework or practice tests, go over your child's answers with them and use the teacher's edition to offer help for getting to the right answers. If you hit a wall, call in a tutor, approach the teacher for help, or purchase a supplementary book from the For Dummies series, published by Wiley & Sons, or the Complete Idiot's Guide series, published by Penguin.

• Find an angle, spark an interest.
  Help your kids find a connection with the subject matter, which may or may not seem totally dry to them. Find a way for them to care about what they're learning by using their interests to spark motivation. If it's languages your child is struggling with, try going on a trip to a place where the language is spoken (even an authentic restaurant), or rent foreign films on DVD from Netflix and try watching them with and without the subtitles. If biology is the issue, maybe a few episodes of House, ER or CSI might make the connection, or a trip to a local science museum (especially if you can find the traveling Bodies exhibit). If physics is the issue, try relating gravity and torque to cars, skateboards, or sports, depending on their interests. You get the idea.

For more tips, check out Working with Teachers for Tutoring Results.

Cheers,
Sheila

You don't have to be a top executive or a celebrity to consider hiring a personal assistant. These days, personal assistants are becoming more and more common—especially in families where both parents have full-time careers—and are available in a variety of roles and job descriptions.

Here are just a few of the types of Personal Assistants available and which kinds of help they generally offer:

• Executive Assistant
  An Executive Assistant is generally an administrative person who works within a company as both receptionist and office manager to a VP or higher. Executive Assistants manage the executive's schedules and calendars, run errands related to meetings and events (such as lunch orders and catering), and research and book travel arrangements, among other duties. The important difference between an Executive Assistant and a Personal Assistant is that an EA is hired by the company, not the individual, and generally works on a 9 to 5 schedule.

• Personal Assistant
  Depending on the employer, a Personal Assistant's job description can range from that of an Executive or Administrative Assistant in a traditional business sense (but outside the office) to that of a "handler" in the celebrity sense, where the personal assistant is the beck-and-call "right hand" to their employer. Personal Assistants can perform duties as varied as those of a travel planner, general "gofer", public relations rep, schedule manager, agent, social secretary, and more. These details should be worked out in advance between employer and interviewee, and should include a laundry list of tasks and expectations on performance. Traits to look for are tactfulness, organizational skills, diplomacy, impeccable judgment, self-motivation, and resourcefulness.

• Household Manager
  Personal Assistants for non-celebrities are also known in some circles as Household Managers, and are expected to do everything from errand running to bill paying so that their employer can focus on the tasks most important to their career(s). A Household Manager is generally a personal assistant for couples or families in which both adults work full-time. They are responsible for matters related to both family and professional life, and will generally act as liaison between the two parents, between parents and teachers, and between parents and other "hired help", including: pet sitters, gardeners, contractors, and others. A few agencies now exist through which you can find a Household Manager, and soon you will be able to find these and other home care providers through Care.com!

• Social Secretary
  Hired by diplomats, politicians, and executives to help navigate the ever-disappearing line between personal and professional life, Social Secretaries are responsible for handling social correspondence, lunches, and other events, as well as remembering names, birthdays, relationships, and other vital information for their employer's contacts. Social Secretaries also plan and host events, dinner and cocktail parties, and, like professional event planners, ensure that all details are in order and that things go smoothly from beginning to end. (The White House generally employs several social secretaries at a time!) For the rest of us, especially those whose careers include a lot of social activity or entertaining, a Social Secretary can be most helpful in getting through life with poise and grace.

While it's a widely accepted practice to ask your babysitter or nanny to perform a few of these tasks in addition to child care—especially if the babysitter or nanny is interested in making more money or working longer hours—the conversation should be broached early on in the relationship. You should also ask yourself what is more important to you: Do you want your babysitter or nanny focus on the wellbeing of your kids? Or is it more important that they focus on helping you maintain your household and relieve you of some personal errands?

So, where do you draw the line? And when is it considered asking too much? Use my checklist below to find the right balance, and to decide whether or not you should hire a personal assistant in addition to your babysitter or nanny. Either way, you should always discuss tasks and expectations upfront in the interview for any position, and if your needs change after the nanny, babysitter, or other assistant has been hired, be sure to sit him or her down and discuss whether or not they're interested in performing the additional work and what additional payment they require.

OK to expect:

• Light cleaning and dishwashing
• Picking up after kids and pets
• Mail retrieval
• Watering plants
• Some cooking
• Taking phone messages
• Drop off/pick up kids at school and activities

Not OK to expect:

• Laundry
• Heavy housekeeping
• All administrative duties
• Managing other household staff (dog walkers, gardeners, contractors, etc.)
• Grocery shopping
• Errands (dry cleaning, etc.)
• All cooking (hire a personal chef or meal delivery service!)

Do you have experience hiring a personal assistant? Or have you asked your babysitter or nanny to help out in this capacity? Share your thoughts with the Care.com community by leaving a comment!

Cheers,
Sheila

No matter how organized we are and how reliable our caregivers, everyone ends up needing help in a pinch sometimes: your nanny calls in sick, the babysitter got into an accident, or an emergency arises all of a sudden and you don't have a care provider scheduled.

So, how can we prepare ahead of time to make sure our bases are covered—expecting the unexpected, so to speak? Prepare for last-minute and emergency care needs now by following these 5 simple and proactive steps:

• #1: Clean up your Contacts.
  Do some New Year's cleaning on your emergency contact list and make sure that everyone listed, both for yourself and your caregivers, is going to be available on the other end. Have they moved? Do they have a new cell phone or work number? Are you in touch regularly? In case you missed it, check out my blog post from last week on Creating Support Systems for more advice on developing a strong and foolproof emergency contact list.

• #2: Create a Favorites File.
  Find and interview at least five (5) providers with last-minute availability to keep on file for an emergency situation, and check in with them regularly to make sure their on-call availability is still current. You can use a traditional paper file system, or you can save these Providers to your Favorites on Care.com and easily access them from anywhere right in your My Account section.

• #3: Remember The Golden Rule.
  Offer to help out a friend, relative, or neighbor even if you're a bit busy so that they will be more likely to return the favor when you need it. As the saying goes, do for others as you hope they would do for you.

• #4: Plan C: Be Co-operative.
  Join or create a community child, pet, or elder care co-op or swap. Even if you don't meet regularly, a simple list of willing "swappers" for emergency situations can get you out of a pinch as a backup plan.

• #5: Run through the motions.
  Create a phone tree of relatives, neighbors, and providers and basic "protocol" for emergencies, and run through the motions as a drill (if only in your head!) from time to time. That way, you'll increase your chances of staying calm and won't panic when the time of need arises.

Do you have additional tips for finding and planning ahead for last-minute and emergency help? Please share them with the Care.com community by leaving a comment!

Cheers,
Sheila