It’s that time of year again. Ariel’s back in preschool.

Monday was the first day, but not a full day. When you’re talking about a 3 hour school day, not a full day means things run pretty short. Monday was the day to get the kids familiar with the classroom, the teacher and each other just a little bit.

The kids are very excited about the new playground the school had put in during the summer. When I registered her, the school still had the old metal playground, but now it’s the kind you see all over the place. They even have a tunnel with the exterior set up for the kids to climb all over.

The challenge is that it isn’t quite done yet. As of yesterday, the swings weren’t hung up, there was an area still to be concreted in, the track for the tricycles wasn’t painted, and the grass is new and cannot be walked on for two weeks. Good thing the kids are allowed on the other equipment! Read the rest of this entry »

A home business is a great way for stay at home parents to add to the family’s income. The startup costs are far lower than for a business outside the home, but there are still expenses to be considered, and they can impact a tight budget rapidly.

The basic expenses of a home business will vary by the type of business, but you really cannot help but have some expenses. If you join a direct sales opportunity, you will probably want to buy some of the products for yourself. If you start an online business, you will probably have hosting costs.

In all cases you will have some sort of advertising costs. These can be as simple as the cost of business cards or as complex as placing ads in newsletters, pay per click search engines and other places.

Before you start spending money on your new business, you need to decide how much you can afford to spend and how to budget it. Don’t spend anything until you have figured out what you absolutely must have in order to get started. Read the rest of this entry »

What do you want to do with your life?

One of the best things about a home business is that it can help you to achieve your dreams, whether they be so simple as to be there for your family or you have a dream home, dream vacation, etc.

Visualizing your dreams can be a challenge. In the day to day efforts of keeping your home business afloat you can forget the things that you really want to achieve.

How you visualize your dreams is up to you. Some people find it simplest to find pictures of the things they want in life and hang them on a board in their work area. Others use a notebook.

Everyone has those days where nothing seems to go right with their business. Maybe you feel like quitting on those days, as it seems your dreams are no closer than when you began. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve added some new job possibilities to the work at home section. I also corrected or removed a few bad links. Hopefully some of you will find these to be of interest.

I also added a new section on writing jobs. These are typically freelance rather than actual jobs, since that is a lot of what you find for writers out there, but it’s something for those who love to write.

Why is it that I have such trouble getting creative at lunchtime? I have all kinds of recipes for dinner, while breakfast I just stick with the standards. But lunch is a challenge.

I get bored with it. I don’t like just making melted cheese sandwiches, mac n’ cheese, defrosting chicken nuggets, cooking hot dogs and other such things every day. I have an additional challenge in that my daughter, like me, does not like peanut butter, so there goes one lunchtime staple.

I think a lot of it has to do with the habit of eating out at lunchtime. Just think about it. As you go through school, you eat lunch there, whether it be purchased at school or you bring something from home. When you get a job, you probably are there at lunchtime, so once again you bring or buy something.

But when you’re a stay at home parent, you have to make lunch every day, and suddenly the standard sandwich doesn’t seem to be good enough for every day. It gets boring. Read the rest of this entry »

Forums are a great resource for stay at home and work at home parents. They’re a place to meet other parents in more or less the same situation as you are in. You get to make a variety of friends without leaving the house or trying to get a break from the kids.

But a forum can also be a place where you feel ignored. Sometimes the questions you ask just don’t get answered for some reason.

A forum can be rather like a room full of people talking all at once, except that you can break into any conversation that interests you and ask just about anything. You’re just about anonymous. This makes it easier to ask some questions and often get a wide range of responses, but not always.

The first thing you want to do is make sure your topic is very clear. If your topic is vague people are less likely to click on it. Try to make the topic a general form of the question you want answered and use the post to give additional information. Read the rest of this entry »

A home office of one sort or another is a vital part of working at home. Some people manage to have an entirely separate room for their home office. Mine is a more or less dedicated room… unless you count all the kids’ toys right behind my chair, on my desk, under my feet…

It’s hard to keep kids out of the home office, especially when it doesn’t have a door. I’m not really sure what to call the room my office is in. It’s just off the dining area, but there’s no doorway as such; the spaces are open to each other aside from a wall less than two feet long.

Life has definitely become easier in many ways since we got a second computer. My son is too young to understand computers, but he sure likes to scroll around Google Earth. My daughter loves to play games on Noggin and similar sites. Letting the kids use the other computer gives me more time to work. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time of year again already. Sometime this month or next the kids will head back to school. Are you ready?

For many parents this is both a sad and happy time. It is often hard to let the youngest kids head off to school, but it generally gets easier through the years.

Back to school also means more quiet time at home. If you work at home, this means more time to get work done. If you’re a stay at home parent without a work at home job or home business it means you have more time to keep the house clean, work on your hobbies and so forth.

I’ve only dealt a little bit with all this. My daughter goes back to preschool soon. She only goes 3 days a week, 3 hours a day this year, so she won’t be gone all day. I have to help out in her class three times each month too. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite the fact that my blog did continue to add posts (prewritten, for those who were wondering), I was on vacation for about a week recently. Lots of family fun, got to see lots of relatives I haven’t seen in many years, got to meet my sister’s new baby too.

All around, a very nice vacation. There wasn’t even the temptation to work most nights, since most of the time we spent the night at my grandparent’s place. No internet connection there. Not even a computer.

OK, so my dad was visiting and he had his laptop with him. I didn’t touch it.

Vacations are very nice, but they can really drive home some of the things you need to get under control when you take a look at the things that pile up. I don’t mean things like mail – we had the post office hold it for us. Email on the other hand… Read the rest of this entry »

It has always amazed me the fuss people make about breastfeeding. Most these days will concede that it is best for baby, but they certainly don’t want to see it!

This came up in a topic on the Digital Point Forums, in reference to the cover of BabyTalk magazine. People were quite offended because the cover showed a mother nursing her baby.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that the cover shows a lot more than I did any time I nursed in public. However I’ve seen women wear clothes that showed about the same.

This has long been an interesting topic to me. The one thing that always amazes me is how many people suggest that a woman should go into a restroom to nurse her child! All I ever say to that is “Would you eat in a public restroom?” Read the rest of this entry »