Summer is most decidedly here, and with it comes the possibility of swimming. Are your kids enrolled in swimming lessons yet?

Even if you don’t have a pool, it’s an excellent idea to start your kids on swimming lessons while they’re young. Think about the times you might decide to go to the beach, river, lake, water park, etc. Or maybe they have a friend who has a pool.

Most communities have a community pool where you can get lessons for a pretty reasonable price. I have Ariel enrolled in two sessions this summer – one in July and one in August at our community pool. Ariel is a pretty good swimmer for her age, but she is only 4 and I will be putting her in swimming lessons every summer for years to come yet.

For me it is extremely important. My inlaws have a swimming pool in their backyard, and it is not fenced off from the rest of the yard. We’ve tried many times to talk them into buying one of those safety nets, but so far no go, which drives me nuts.

We talk a lot about pool and water rules with Ariel. She knows that if she EVER sets even one foot in that pool without permission, she won’t get to go into the pool that visit, and possibly the next one. She can’t run around it and she isn’t to even walk near it alone.

Gage is, of course, a little trickier. I don’t have him signed up for the Mommy and baby swimming lessons because we do more or less the same things with him on our own already. First summer he’s old enough for regular swimming lessons he will get them. But for now he requires a tremendous amount of watching, since he is rather impulsive.

It doesn’t matter if your family only goes near the water once a year or less. It’s easier to learn to swim while you’re younger. Better yet, kids love learning to swim. Swimming lessons are one activity you can sign your kids up for and know that it won’t be a waste. They’re learning a skill that will help keep them safer.

Feels good to be able to work again easily. I spilled water on my keyboard the other day, and the letter c, the number 2 and the “Home” key all quit working. There’s only so much you can do without all the keys working.

I got some work done using right click to copy and paste. This allowed me to type anything I wanted, so long as I kept a page open where those characters were.

There’s one very simple thing I love about shopping at Office Depot. They’re just down the street from me, which means that if I place an order over $50 online they will deliver it free the next business day. Very useful.

My keyboard is the Microsoft(R) Natural(R) Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. I love it. Office Depot was selling it for $49.99, but fortunately I needed some paper anyhow, which made reaching the minimum order quite painless. Sitting around waiting for the order was no fun, but that’s just life.

It was kind of painful having to get a new keyboard when my current one was barely six months old, but that is what I get for drinking water at my desk. I was so hopeful that it would be ok in the morning after drying out, but not this time.

I was quite please with Office Depot’s pricing. Amazon was charging $49.95 for the same keyboard, but to get mine sooner with no delivery charge and no driving around town looking for the right keyboard I wasn’t going to complain about 4 cents.

Office Depot…Free Delivery on Orders Over $50 in Select Trading Areas.

One of those jobs that tends to fall to moms is taking care of the family pets. In our case, it’s a pair of mice named Gus and Jaq, for the mice in Cinderella.

I knew full well that I’d have to take care of the mice when we decided to let my daughter have them for her birthday. I’m the one at home the most, and cleaning a mouse cage is a bit beyond the abilities of a four year old.

I do make her help where she can, though. She can put food in the bowl, put bedding in the clean cage and so forth.

The biggest trick with family pets is keeping kids interested in caring for them. I think my daughter was disappointed to find out that you just can’t play with mice the way you do with cats or dogs. She can’t hold them unless my husband or I are hovering nearby in case the mouse gets away.

I know a lot of people say you shouldn’t get little pets for little kids because kids aren’t nice to small animals. I find it isn’t a problem so long as you make sure the animals are treated right. Kids can learn quickly how to touch even a small animal. Even my son, who isn’t quite 16 months old yet, touches the mice very gently. If left to himself, yes, he would probably crush one in sheer delight of seeing an animal, but with supervision he is taken from the mice long before he gets that excited.

Pets of all sizes need parental supervision with young children, of course. Children can accidentally injure smaller animals very easily. Cats can get annoyed enough to scratch, and no parent wants their child to suffer through a dog attack.

Taking care of the family pet is more than just cleaning up after them. It’s making sure the animals are treated right and that your children learn how to treat them and care for them.

This report doesn’t surprise me… more people are choosing to work at home because gas prices keep going up. I know that I consider it one of the blessings of working at home that I know I don’t have to buy as much gas.

Some interesting quotes:

About 36 percent of telecommuting customer service agents say gas prices have driven their decision to work at home, according to a new survey of nearly 2,000 at-home call center agents by LiveOps, which contracts with call center agents.

offering telecommuting options is among the top five approaches being used by companies to help employees deal with gas prices.

Sun Microsystems has seen an increase in employees interested in a flexible work program that lets them work anywhere, including from home. More than 13,000 of Sun’s employees work from home up to two days a week, and about 2,000 work from home more than three days a week. It saves employees an average of two hours a week in commute time.

I’ve been saying for a long time that telecommuting is a great option with gas prices going up. I started my section on saving gas a year or two ago (I forget which), when gas prices weren’t nearly so high as they are now. Admittedly it’s a rather obvious solution, but it’s good to see businesses taking the option more seriously.

I guess it’s probably time to do some more research on the topic to freshen things up there. No, I’m not going to add anything on gas pills or stuff like that; I haven’t been convinced by any of them and most are freshened up versions of old scams.

[tags]work at home, saving gas, telecommuting[/tags]

This is one of those topics I deal with quite a bit. It doesn’t matter how many tactics you have for keeping your kids busy when you work at home, there are just days when they don’t want you to work, they want you to pay attention to them. What can you do?

Maybe it’s time for a reassessment. Are you spending enough time on your kids? Working at home has a way of taking up all the time you are willing to give it and then some. It’s very easy for it to get out of control.

Take a look at what you’re having your kids do while you’re working. Are they getting bored with the routine? Maybe the special toys just don’t seem special to them anymore and it’s time to rotate them.

Talk to your kids. Find out why they don’t want you to work. Talk to them about what you’re doing and why. You might even find a way to get them involved.

I got to thinking on this topic because my 4 year old daughter has been getting upset with me for working so much lately. We talked and I made a little more special time for her. I think the main problem wasn’t so much that I worked too much as it was jealousy of her younger brother. At 15 months old he always wants something, and telling him no rarely works well. He’s hard to distract once he gets an idea.

Talking really helped. So does calling her over just out of the blue for a hug. Those are generally enthusiastically granted.

In the years I’ve spent working at home I’ve found that changing tactics is often necessary when it comes to keeping the kids busy. You need to keep up with their changing interests and make things interesting to them.

I’ve added a bunch of new bargains in the online bargains section. There are still more places I need to check for bargains, but this gives it a good number of new ones. Have to work on the unresearched jobs section next, as well as tomorrow’s newsletter. Mondays are so busy!

Fortunately I do get to relax too. My husband set up our big blowup swimming pool the other day, and it has been steadily warming up. It’s about two feet deep, I’d say, so deep enough to relax in and for the kids to have a lot of fun playing in.

Of course, the disadvantage is that now I have to supervise them carefully in the back yard. Can’t take chances, after all. Ariel gets in every chance she gets, so far only with permission, but she has tried just saying “I’m going in the pool now!” and heading for it. Can’t turn my back on her out there.

The pool is too small to easily chlorinate, so instead my husband regularly takes some of the water out for the plants, and then we change it. Actually, we generally leave it empty for a week or two, since it takes a lot of water. But it is nice to cool off since where we are the temperatures are getting up there… and so is the humidity, which is worse.

Just when I thought I had the little buggers almost under control, they’re back! Not in the places they had been coming in, of course, new places.

This has been a battle literally from the day we moved in. We had ants in my son’s bedroom even before we started unpacking, and we never did figure out what they were after. He was only a few months old, so I know he didn’t have anything hidden in that box!

This time they’ve found the kitchen trash, which I’m amazed they’ve left alone all this time, and the kitchen table. Not many of them on the table; they’re just checking it out, but you know how easy it is for kids to leave crumbs all over the place.

They’re also wandering aimlessly on the bathroom counter. No idea what has attracted them there.

Yes, this does drive me utterly up the wall. Ants are just so hard to beat back completely, and they must have been pretty well established in this house before we moved in. I love living in a house for the most part, but there are certain parts of this house I won’t miss, and the ants are a big part of it.

Well, I’ve finally decided to join the crowd and create a MySpace profile. You can check it out here if you like. I haven’t done much with it yet, but I did fill out a profile and edit how the page appears. No point looking like everyone else just because I’m following the crowd, after all. I themed the page after this site, so you’ll probably recognize things there.

Hopefully this will be a good way to meet and network with other stay at home and work at home parents. It is one of the challenges, after all, since with young children it can be very difficult to get out of the house to meet other people.

Now I just have to figure out how to use it. I know there are lots of tools to build huge networks there, but that is not my style. I prefer reality, and don’t like any form of spamming. Yes, it takes more time, but it’s worth it in the long run.

However, I’m going to save that for another day. There are many other things I want to get done, and this MySpace thing is not a top priority… more of an experiment for me. Might be more over time, depending on how initial results go. I’m going to have to figure out how it all works, after all.