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 »