Announcing Au Pair Appreciation Week 2014

by cv harquail on January 11, 2014

The 6th Annual International

Au Pair Appreciation Week

February 1 – 7, 2014

Host Parents, start your appreciation engines.…!

For details on how celebrate your au pair or another au pair you know, click ahead…..

Au Pair Appreciation Week is our chance as host moms and dads to celebrate what we enjoy the most about having au pairs in our family lives.

Although moms and dads who ask for advice here on AuPairMom are occasionally accused of being grumpy, demanding, and/or hard to live with, we all know that we wouldn’t even BE host moms and dads if we didn’t believe that having an au pair could be a great experience.

It’s true that on this blog we usually talk about problems because we’re asking each other for help, but at the same time we know that behind every bad au pair story there are dozens of happy au pair stories just waiting to be told.

Au Pair Appreciation Week is your chance to share those happy stories– to tell your own and to hear those of other host families.

cute girl by blackboard.jpg3 Options for Sharing “Appreciations”

We have some great participants on this site who love to write, and from whom we can expect some lovely stories. But also, there are lots of host parents who might prefer a shorter, more concise mode of sharing. And, there are host parents probably prefer pictures to words.

For  AuPair Appreciation Week (APAW) we’ll have three different options for sharing what you appreciate about your au pair.

1. Tell us a story about something that your au pair did for you, your kids, your family, or anyone else. Enjoy the opportunity to tell us as much as you want, however you want to, anywhere between 50 and 500 words. Depending on how many stories we receive, I’ll either set them up as one big post, or unfold a series of happy stories over the course of APAW.

2. Share just one characteristic, action or vignette, but this time in the short form. You can have more than the 140 characters of twitter and you can make it as short as a paragraph.

3. Send in a photo, with a brief caption.

Rules of AuPair Appreciation Week:

kitchen blue jars twelve 22 dot org.jpg1. Anyone can participate– Host Parents, host kids, grandparents, neighbors and au pairs too.

2. You may submit as many appreciations as you like– but please make each appreciation about only one au pair at a time. Let each au pair have her or his own appreciation (unless it’s some kind of special case).

3. Your appreciation can be for your current au pair, a former au pair, or another au pair you know.

4. If you use your au pair’s name or likeness, you must have her or his explicit permission to share it. Probably best to use a pseudonym, especially if you want to surprise her or him with a little public praise.

5. Your real name and email address must be part of the submission. However, I will only publish your name if you ASK ME to. Otherwise, you will be anonymous. You’ve gotta opt in to become an AuPairMom celebrity host parent, okay?

6. By virtue of sending it to me in an email, you’re allowing me (CV Harquail) to publish your story, paragraph and/or photo here on AuPairMom.

7. Remember that computer glitches and stuff might get in the way of this being super-efficient. Let’s see how it goes.

How to submit your appreciations:

— Submit your appreciation via email to mom at AuPairMom dot com

— Please put APAW in the subject so that I can sort submissions easily from my other email.

— Put your story in the BODY of the email text, not as an attachment.  This is really important, because it can be very hard to strip formatting out of an email to put it into web-pretty text.

— Put the caption of your photo in the body of the email text, and make your photo an attachment.

— Submissions may be sent anytime between now (Jan 11) and Feb. 1.   Send some soon so that I can queue them up and be ready to let loose the love on Feb 1st.

Questions? Anything I forgot? Anyone want to make us a pretty APAW button or banner? Let me know.

We are all looking forward to hearing your great stories of Au Pair Appreciation!

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