Allison, congrats to your DD!
Megan, sorry your BF's family is like that.
Dagmar, after your post I was all set to try Carter out at the hotel overnight . . . but this morning I looked online and found a couple negative reviews of the owner's previous business (another dog hotel in another part of the city). Now I'm afraid to trust Carter to them! There are no bad reviews of the new hotel yet, but it's only been open a few months and there are no good reviews yet either. Meanwhile the sitter we were looking at has only positive reviews, and a lot of them. But for an overnight + afternoon dinner break it's going to cost us $78/night, which is $13/night more than our old sitter. I'm talking to her about possibly having her just do the overnight part ($60, 9pm-6:30am) and having my MIL feed Carter his dinner, but there are insurance implications to that.
Meanwhile meanwhile, I finally got an email from the other sitter we had been trying to get in touch with, apologizing for the delay. She said she'd be happy to meet us and Carter any time after this week, because her daughter is about to have a baby pretty much any minute this week. Now #1, I'm upset it took so long to send me an email about this (why couldn't she just email me immediately and say she was busy this week?), #2 I figure with a new grandchild she may not really be able to devote that much attention to Carter. OTOH, her overnight is $65 for 6pm-7am which is very appealing.
GAH, what to do, what to do.