Most families will at one point or another deal with someone who doesn’t want to eat their vegetables. It’s not always the kids either. Sometimes it’s the husband. Sometimes the wife too, I suppose, although I haven’t met many women who don’t eat vegetables.

I’ve been pretty lucky so far with my own children. Everyone does pretty well with vegetables. My kids often take them as snacks. My husband can be a bit more challenging, as he’ll gladly skip the veggies and go for the meat, but all I have to do is remind him he’s setting the example and he’ll eat what I put in front of him.

But there are some tricks to get your kids to eat veggies they don’t particularly care for. One of my simplest techniques is to simply make a sauce for stir fried vegetables, a kind my kids really like. I’ve noticed that kids who like vegetables pretty well will eat them even faster with a good sauce. You can also use catsup or salad dressing to encourage kids to eat their vegetables. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most common pieces of advice you hear when thinking about starting your own home business is to find your passion. It sounds like great advice, but how much thought do you really give to what that means?

Having a passion for your business means you have an emotional involvement. This actually helps you to succeed in a home business, as it means more to you.

Start out by thinking about why you really want to start a home business. There are all kinds of reasons, from wanting more time for your family to needing the additional income and so forth. However, keep in mind that your home business will likely take a lot of time and is a financial risk, so keep your expectations realistic, particularly in the challenging early days.

Finding your passion isn’t necessarily as simple as just thinking about what you enjoy. You need to think about whether you will enjoy doing something as a business. Read the rest of this entry »

This one comes as a result of how I spent my day today – helping my inlaws try to recover lost digital photos. So far as I can tell it’s nothting they did, aside from try to do a backup and have their computer go nuts and destroy the pictures instead. The files still appear to be there, but when they try to view them they get a “No preview available” message.

OK, so reminding you to keep your digital photos backed up as I tell you to keep yours backed up may sound kind of bass ackward, but it isn’t really. From reading online and following their exact steps it appears to have been a freak occurance that others have gone through as well, and no one has a solution that brings the pictures back, at least not that worked for us.

Here’s how it happened. They decided to try taking all their digital photos from the last 4 years and put them on a CD. They got a message saying that there wasn’t enough room on the CD for all the pictures, so they cancelled it but got a message popping up in a balloon reminding them that there were items waiting to be burned to CD, so they did what should have been the right solution and told the computer to delete the temporary files. This should have been perfectly safe. Read the rest of this entry »

Ariel always makes me laugh. At 4 years of age, the line between reality and fantasy really is thin.

Today she demanded that I pay attention as she watched Leap Frog’s Letter Factory. “See??” she demanded. “THAT’s how you get to the letter factory. You drive straight and then turn and then turn and drive straight.”

Yes, I had a very hard time not laughing.

She’s been after me to take her there, and my excuse has always been that I don’t know how to get to the Letter Factory. She doesn’t buy that I don’t know how to get to the Frogs’ house to start.

We had a little talk about television not being real. She is not ready to believe that yet. It’s sure sweet at times, though. Other times… well, I’ll be glad when she gets it.

[tags]kids,children,family,television,reality,preschoolers,letter factory[/tags]

One of the advantages of being an at-home parent is how much more time you have to do things with your family. There’s no rushing about trying to get everyone out the door first thing in the morning, clean and neat and well fed.

Yeah, right. Except when school’s in session.

In my opinion, in many ways it is harder for stay at home parents to get their kids going on school mornings. Not due to any particular failure on their part, but simply because many of them don’t have a morning routine. When the kids aren’t in school there’s little need for one. No rush for both mom and dad to get ready while the children do the same. It makes it a little more challenging sometimes.

But a good morning routine is very helpful, especially when it comes to encouraging good eating habits. Breakfast is a meal very easily skipped, despite its importance.

Routines will vary from family to family, but the most important point to consider here is the need to leave enough time for everyone to get breakfast. Read the rest of this entry »