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[quote=Anonymous]Another recommendation to check out aupairmom.com and also to take your time and take very seriously the matching process.

But our experience is different than 20:25's, in that we DO hire APs who are 19 yrs old Germans and only have babysitting experience or experience taking care of siblings and cousins, provided that they are smart, proactive, and very ambitious.  Our children are 7 and 11, and the 7 yr old has special needs, but we have found that the APs who work best with us are people who are ready and willing to learn and have very proactive and flexible natures.  Our APs work very hard when they are working but don't work more than 25 hrs/week.  As another mom on APM once wrote, we hire for attitude and train for skill, and this approach has worked well for us.

So there are APs for everyone with all kinds of experience, and you need to figure out what YOU need and go out and seek it actively.  The best thing you can do is sit down and think (and write out) very, very clearly about what your lines in the sand are, what you are asking of your AP (in our case, we ask for involved interaction just a few hours a day, and the rest is "care taking" in the form of driving, preparing meals,  waiting outside therapy appointments and swim practices, etc), and what you absolutely need in terms of personality (we do best with direct not shy, extremely social, very independent, etc).  I am happy with a party-hearty AP and couldn't care less if she goes out 7 nights a week, provided she is ON with my children the brief hours each day she needs to.  So figure out what YOU want and need and then be clear about it.

I wasted a lot of time in my early years as a HM (we're on year seven) expecting APs to figure out what I wanted, expecting them to know how to do our job just because they had experience (we had former nannies, former kindergarten teachers, etc).  but you know what?  experience in a kindergarten in Costa Rica does not necessarily prepare them to work in MY house, so the best thing I learned was to tell and show, very clearly and explicitly, what i wanted and needed and then to have someone who was smart and proactive enough to do what I asked - and then find her own ways that worked better for her, once she knew us and our job well enough to expand and extrapolate.

Good luck, OP.  It's very exciting and can be very rewarding hosting APs, but it can also be exhausting, so figuring out what you want will help you minimize some unnecessary work down the road.[/quote]

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