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[quote=Anonymous]Don't do it, unless you absolutely LOVE your AP and she/he feels like family to you.

When we were host family virgins and doing our initial search, we were getting a lot of AP's who weren't responding to us, or asking us to release them from the hold, because it seemed like they wanted to live in a more glamorous place than suburban Maryland (NYC, LA, San Fran, etc.).

After not getting many responses during our first search, we updated our host family profile on the CCAP website and recruited more hard core by indicating that we would bring our AP along on vacations with us to California and Florida. We thought this would sweeten the deal for the AP.  We got more bites, and hired our AP.

The vacations were a complete bust. Our AP did not help as much as we needed to on the flights, and it was mega expensive to pay for the extra plane tickets, uber rides for touring, meals out, and hotel rooms, especially because we brought her with us during Thanksgiving and Christmas.

On Thanksgiving, she was totally bored because she did not understand the holiday. We gave her the day off. She didn't help cook, didn't help clean up, didn't ask questions, didn't even bring her dish into the kitchen, and basically had my extended family wait on her hand and foot during the entire meal. She didn't even talk to my kids during the party. She served herself wine even though she was under 21. The rest of the vacation, she went on Tinder and took Ubers to meet up with random people. We tried to make it a nice vacation for her. We took her shopping, out to dinner, took her site-seeing, and introduced her to some family that was her age to hang out with.  We really made an effort to include her. She was mostly only around when it was her work hours, and didn't do much with the kids because she was unfamiliar with the city. They sat around and watched TV when she was on duty.

At Christmas, she was sad (I was sympathetic to that, because she was away from her family for the first time). We gave her a few days off to explore the city aside from the holiday days, but she seemed put out when we asked her to work on other days during the trip. During the family Christmas meal, it was the same experience as Thanksgiving. We gave her a big cash bonus for Christmas, plus other presents. We included her in all family activities. We made the same efforts and gave her the choice to hang out with us or do something on her own. Again, while on duty, she just had my kids watch TV. The entire vacation, it felt completely disjointed.

My sister has an AP who is like family. She pitches in even when she's not on "duty", she's fun to be around, she smiles and laughs at jokes, she's nice to all the kids in the family, helps with dishes even when we tell her to relax, etc. It is worth the travel money to have her around because she is a pleasure to be around.

Our AP never felt like family, and that especially showed when we were on these family vacations. It made the extra expense not worth it, it caused more hassle to find things for her to do, we felt obligated to entertain her more and had less time to relax, it aggravated our extended family and friends to have her around, and she didn't even say "thank you" after either trip.  To spend an extra $1500+ on a person for an experience like that, TWICE, was awful.

So I would only include an AP if you truly feel like she's family and you absolutely adore her.  Otherwise, I don't think it's worth the hassle. You can always hire hourly babysitters from nanny agencies if you need a sitter during a trip.  The next time we went on a trip, we just paid our AP her regular weekly stipend and gave her that extra vacation time off.  It was totally worth it.[/quote]

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