Ron and I want to take advantage of Columbus Day in October with a long weekend away as a family. But, what to do with Sydney, our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and Blake, our Cairn Terrier? It's only for the weekend, and they'd really enjoy coming along, but with the surging popularity of pet hotels, we're also considering our options.

Based on my research (and that of our editorial team), here are my tips for deciding whether hiring a sitter through Care.com or trying a pet hotel is right for your family:

Consider the Cost
One-on-one time at home with a dog walker or sitter is always the best option for your pet, and when combined with house sitting, can even save you money. But, sometimes it's hard to find overnight care (or a pet-friendly people hotel) at the last minute, so a pet hotel ($40-60 per night) is a great Plan B to save you the mental cost of stress and anxiety.

Reservations for a "Pet Palace"
Pet hotels are upscale kennels with loads of creature comforts. Private rooms ($40-60 per night) come with tons of amenities: pet masseuses, room service and play time with treadmills and swimming pools. Wow! When the vacation's over, your best friend might have a better time than you did.

Be Inspector Gadget
Wherever you decide to board, it's important to inspect the facilities in a similar way you'd look for a child's daycare. Is it clean? Is it spacious with good light? Does it smell good? Are there certifications and background checks for the employees? And, maybe most importantly, how's the food?

Know Your Pets' Limits
Not every animal is happy being away from home, no matter how posh the surroundings. We talked to Lisa Katayama, publisher of TokyoMango and a regular writer for Wired magazine who "broke" the pet hotels trend, about checking her Miniature Pinscher, Ruby, into the Wag Hotel in San Francisco. They offered a live, in-room webcam and Lisa spent most of the night watching her puppy's every move. By 2:30 a.m., Ruby was howling inconsolably and Lisa rushed to bring her home. After that experience, Lisa had enough.

"Call me a crazy dog owner," Lisa said, "but I'd rather leave her with a trusted friend than put her in solitary confinement overnight."

No Worries
Camps and hotels give added peace of mind by having experts attending to your furry family members. For example, we talked to PetSmart who launched their PetsHotel offering in 2005. Each hotel has vets on site and every employee has to pass an annual safety certification with a perfect score. With constant "guest supervision," it's nice to know there's always a pair of eyes watching to make sure no one gets their little, wet nose into trouble.

Take a Test Run
Only you can decide if your puppy or kitten will be happy in a new environment. If your pet is a either total homebody or a social butterfly, perhaps they'd be better off staying at home with the personal touch of a sitter. Try checking Care.com for one in your area. If you do want to try out a pet hotel, they often provide free screenings and, in some cases, actually require one. It's a good way for everyone to test the water before booking Fido for the night.

Finding the right place for your pet goes a long way toward giving you peace of mind while you're separated from your best friend (or friends!)

What about you? Do you take your dogs and cats with you on vacation or go the kennel route? Share your experiences with the Care.com community by posting a comment!

I just had dinner with a friend who recently moved to another city, and she mentioned that it's hard for her to meet other moms. We agreed that networking with other moms is important, giving us a sense of community and support system.

Her struggle is a common Catch 22: she works full-time and isn't available during the day to get to know stay-at-home moms, and the moms she knows from work want to spend time outside the office with their families. She also wonders if there really is a "mommy war" between stay-at-home and working moms, preventing them from getting close.

For working moms and dads, there are the competing demands and opposing forces of career and parenting, and for stay-at-home parents, the defensiveness behind their choices to leave the workforce and care for their kids full-time sometimes makes it hard to connect with working parents.

As peers, how can we close the gap between these two groups of parents and form lasting relationships without completely ignoring the issue?

Leslie Morgan Steiner, best-selling author of Mommy Wars and an advertising executive at The Washington Post, was recently interviewed by Meredith Vieira on The Today Show during the Republican National Convention. Meredith asked Leslie if the addition of Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska and mom to five children, including an infant with Down syndrome, to the Republican party presidential ticket is setting a new standard for moms everywhere, further pushing the myth of "Super Mom."

Leslie's answer is very poignant, not only about the election, but about the root cause of the gap between working and stay at home parents:

"I think that women tend to over-personalize other women's choices…about how they juggle work and family," Leslie said on Today. "It's something I do a hundred times a day. And Sarah Palin is not saying to you or to me or to any other woman out there that we have to have five kids and run for vice president of the United States. She's saying that she's doing it and she has to be treated as an individual."

So, how can moms and dads, whether they work or stay at home full-time, build a cohesive community and network for the common good?

Here are my tips:

• Frequent Family Venues
  I suggested to my recently relocated friend that she look into newcomers' clubs and other places where families can meet, like the YMCA or a kids' soccer game. Shared interests like community involvement, religion, or volunteering provide an even playing field for working and stay-at-home parents to bond.

• Create a Care Co-op
  Offer to regularly swap babysitting, child care, or pet sitting, or create a child care co-op between all the families in the neighborhood. Bond over work and kids! See my previous blog posts on Affordable Child Care Options and Tips for Work at Home Moms and Dads for advice on setting one up.

• Have a Block Party
  Weekends are one of the few free times not mutually exclusive to working or stay at home parents, and a great time to host a neighborhood meet-and-greet for all members of the family. Better yet, recruit a few fellow "committee" members and make block parties a regular thing!

• Organize a Social Network or Email List
  Web sites like Facebook, Meetup.com or Ning are a great way to engage parents in your community, and in the virtual space, people can participate at a time of day or week that's most convenient for their schedule. Use a Facebook page, Meetup.com group, or a Ning community to find shared interests, activities, and experiences that you can use to further bond with parents in your area (or from your workplace).

In an interview with Care.com's editors, Leslie also added her perspective on the state of employment options and the need for more collaboration and joint activism from both camps of parents:

"Five or ten years ago, it was tougher for well-educated women to take time off without significant penalty," Leslie said. "Also, [as Americans, we have a] collective devaluation of stay-at-home [parents] who perform years of unpaid labor.  We tend to applaud paid labor in this country.

"There are approximately 81 million moms in America today. Each of us juggles modern motherhood amidst social paradox and flux. Fifty years ago women struggled to force many law schools, business schools, and medical schools to admit women. The number of women with college degrees has doubled in 20 years, and women now make up 51% of the white-collar workforce. In the last 50 years, the percent of American women staying home dropped from 76% to 28%.  None of us has the today's work/kids paradigm figured out.

"Beneath the surface of the "mommy war" between working and at-home mothers lies each woman's inner mommy war, an endless mental debate over whether we've made the right choices about how we juggle work and family.  Now that women's advances at work and at home have increased our options, the challenge for each woman with a bona fide choice is to feel good about her decision—without condemning, or silencing, other women who make different ones...Not a fairytale ending—we won't have that until there's a cornucopia of flexible, well-paid, part-time work for men and women in all segments of the labor force—but far better news than moms have gotten in a long time."

For more advice from Leslie Morgan Steiner, check out: MSNBC.com (specifically for stay-at-home moms looking to re-enter the workforce); her column, Two Cents on Working Motherhood at MommyTrackd.com; or pick up a copy of her best-selling book Mommy Wars.

How do you network with other moms? If you're a stay-at-home or a working dad, how do you find your support system? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please share them on my blog by posting a comment.

T.H., a good friend of ours, just recently visited town. He helped us out a few years ago when he agreed to be our little guy's "manny" (male nanny).

I've heard that some parents struggle with the concept of hiring a guy to watch their kids.  The benefits for us were that our little guy loved talking about his video games and playing soldiers with T.H., and they always talked about football, especially about the New England Patriots (we're so sad about Tom Brady’s knee injury!) They certainly had a close bond, but it helped that we knew T.H. for years as a personal friend before asking him to help watch our son—and three years before launching Care.com.

Recently, there seem to be a growing number of mannies entering the workforce, or at least mentioned in the media, though they still tend to be a minority (about 1% to 10% of all caregivers).

Many parents, especially parents of boys, feel that hiring a manny is a great idea because it provides another positive, male influence for their boys—an additional male role model.

Holly Peterson, author of the new novel The Manny, said in an interview with ABC / Nightline News:

"I've always hired mannies. I love mannies. Mannies are really, really, fun child-care givers because they're messier, they're sillier, they play harder, they rough and tumble your kids all over the park. I think it's great for my kids to have a male role model in the house."

But some parents are wary because of the perception that men aren't as nurturing or compassionate as women, or that there's a bigger safety risk, in terms of background checking and reference checking, to ensure the caregiver isn't a sexual predator or pedophile when the caregiver is male (although according to a 2006 article by FOX News that risk is hotly disputed among researchers.)

The article also features a quote from New York Post sportswriter and longtime male nanny, Sam Blake, who said,

"[Parents] go to male nannies because they're at ease getting dirty, they'll go out and play with the kids a little more, they're more willing, as a generalization, to go out there and get dirty with the kids and do stuff, especially if the kids are boys."

Some additional parents (single moms, parents of children with special needs) have even been featured in the press saying that they prefer male caregivers (mannies or au pairs) because men are stronger and can lift and carry their children more easily than many women could, or in the case of the single moms, they enjoy having someone they can ask to perform handymen tasks from time to time.

One now-single mom who got plenty of press for hiring a manny was Britney Spears, who recruited Perry Taylor, a Naval Academy grad, to care for her two boys back in 2006, and many credit her with "spawning a craze" of hiring male nannies.

Shortly after that decision made headlines, male nannies seemed to pop up everywhere in entertainment, from Freddie Prinze Jr. playing a male nanny on an episode of Friends to the discovery that rock stars Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain hired a "manny" to care for their daughter, Frances Bean, back in the early 1990s.

This should have been no surprise to Generations X and Y, who grew up watching network sitcoms featuring male characters in prominent  caregiving roles like Mr. Belvedere and Charles in Charge, but instead it spurred a debate over whether or not being a full-time nanny was a legitimate profession for a man.

And why not? According to a nanny agency director featured in the ABC / Nightline News segment, mannies can make upwards of $100,000 a year. The problem is just that apparently there's a shortage of men interested in nannying as a profession and the supply of mannies is less than 1% of the total workforce.

Have you ever hired a manny to look after your kids? If not, why not? Does gender matter to you when hiring a caregiver?

Join the conversation by posting a comment!

The other day, our little guy was begging me to see a PG-13 movie. He is only 8, so my immediate response was, "No way." But, then I thought about how I allowed him to watch Revenge of the Sith, which was also PG-13. (Like many boys his age, he's a die-hard Star Wars fan.)

This was the first week of school for many, which means another year older for the kids, who'll soon be pushing for more independence. So where do we draw the line in order to stay consistent? And how do you know when your child is ready, or mature enough?

What are your ages and stages for letting your kids stay home alone? Go for sleepovers? Bike to a friend's house, or take public transportation un-chaperoned? And, if you have more than one child, are you consistent when applying your age limits? 

Our Senior Editorial Director, Felice, just faced this dilemma with her 10-year-old son. Felice and her kids live in a quiet, upscale neighborhood about a mile from downtown Boston, but too close for comfort to the universities and major arteries. While her younger daughter is still in extended day through her school, Felice was nervous about letting her son turn "latchkey" for another two years (Safe Kids USA urges parents not to leave any child under 12 years old home alone.)

Luckily, she found a happy solution through Care.com: a thirty-something "minder," who can be her son's surrogate "older brother," picking him up at school, hanging out with him for a few hours, and driving him to sports practice, all while not making her son feel like he's in need of a babysitter.

Check out these topics and sources for more information, or join the conversation by posting a comment! We'd love to hear your experiences and your "rules of thumb" for ages and stages with your own kids (or those you care for.)

Latchkey Kids / Staying Home Alone

While SafeKids.org urges parents not to leave any child under 12 years old home alone, many of us do allow our children to go latchkey for a few hours between school and the end of our workdays, or when we need to run errands. For each of us, it's a subjective and deeply personal choice that we make as parents based on the resourcefulness, maturity, and comfort levels of our own kids.

If you do decide to let your child stay home alone, go over these safety tips from the National Crime Prevention Council (home of McGruff the Crime Dog) with them first:

• Be discreet: Don't let anyone know that you're home alone.

• Lock up: Learn how to properly secure your home so you can get out, but no one can get in.

• Know the numbers: Review the emergency contact list and know how and who to call in case of an emergency. Choose a nearby neighbor as a "safe house."

• Communicate: Check in with your parents when you get home, and call for permission before leaving to go to the park, biking with friends, or to another friend's home.

• Be alert: If something looks suspicious when you get home, like a broken window or the front door is wide open, don't go inside. Go to your safe house.

Check out this MSNBC article with Dr. Ruth Peters, one of America's favorite advice columnists, a regular contributor to The Today Show, and a clinical psychologist by training, for more tips on raising latchkey kids.

Slumber Parties

Slumber parties (or sleepovers) are as American as apple pie, and just as hard to do really well. According to AZCentral.com, home of The Arizona Republic newspaper, slumber parties are most popular among kids 8 to 14 years old, although they can begin at younger ages and stretch out until college.

So, how do you know when your kids are ready to sleep over at a friend's house? And what should you ensure before they go?

• Start with family members. Your children will be more comfortable at their cousins' house, or with their grandparents, than at another family's home, allowing them to ease into sleeping apart from you. It also allows them to learn to shake up their nighttime routines.

• Know your child. Some kids are ready for sleepovers earlier than others--there isn't one true age to begin hosting or sending your kids off to slumber parties. Make sure that they are polite and respectful enough to abide by another family's rules, and that they are confident enough to make it through the night without your support.

• Know yourself. How comfortable are you with your child sleeping over at another home? Make sure to do your homework before the night of the event, ensuring that the other parents will be home, confirming details about activities, any group excursions, and timing for pick-ups in the morning. Review "the rules" and emergency information with the other parents, and make sure you trust them and their judgment.

What are your family's rules, ages and stages for allowing kids to stay home alone? Slumber parties? Biking to a friend's house un-chaperoned, or taking public transportation?

Share them with the Care.com community by posting a comment!

Cheers,
Sheila