Many parents dream of earning money from home. It could be so that they could be a stay at home parent or it could be a much-needed supplement to the family income. In either case, an online search can quickly lead to disappointment, with all the scams, hard to land legitimate work at home jobs, and home business opportunities.

But there are some relatively easy ways to earn money at home. As the internet grows and changes, more possibilities open up for anything from a few extra dollars a month to some serious money to be earned from your very own computer.

One of the easiest is paid blogging. There are a few ways to do this, from signing on with companies that hire bloggers to write about topics they love to paid posting companies. It’s a fair bit of work and can be time consuming to do a good job of it, but it can also be loads of fun. Read the rest of this entry »

But it’s just so typical. I read over at Blogging Baby that MySpace considers breastfeeding pictures too sexy and removes them regularly.

If you read this blog much, you know that I’m a huge fan of breastfeeding, having done so for both of my children, and over a year for each one. And yes, I breastfed in public at need. It’s easy to be discreet.

I have a MySpace profile, even though I don’t make much use of it really. You hear all about the sexy pictures people put up, and I suppose that’s why MySpace is a little paranoid about things like breastfeeding pictures. But there are far more revealing and provocative pictures that do seem to stick around. Read the rest of this entry »

Mine are a little young for a full summer camp. After all, Ariel will only be 5 by this summer. I don’t think she’d want to go. But summer camps are a great way to give the kids an adventure without you. And of course you get a little peace and quiet.

For those of you out in Texas, I just learned about some delightful Texas summer camps. It’s co-ed, and I can really see my kids someday enjoying something similar when they’re old enough. The classics are there, of course: hiking, swimming, canoeing, but there’s also horseback riding, mountain boarding, rock climbing and more summer camp activities for the kids to enjoy.

I think a good summer camp can be very valuable to children, especially if they live in the city and don’t really get a lot of time in the country. Even children who aren’t used to country life tend to adapt well to being around nature and animals.

It is that time of year to start planning for the summer, even though it’s months away. For me that means planning the swimming lessons and figuring out other ways to keep both children busy. Eventually they’ll be old enough for things like summer camp to be considered, and I expect that will be a lot of fun.

Do any of you send your children to summer camp? Day camp? Or do you cope on your own?

I surprised the other parents at Ariel’s preschool today by still walking her to school, despite a pretty fair downpour going on at the moment. Nothing much compared to what I’ve seen other times, but not a light sprinkle either.

It’s just one of those things about only having one car. I have to cope with the weather when it comes to taking Ariel to school, and I’m not about to let a little rain get in the way.

It did make me realize one thing, though. I need to get a rain cover for the stroller. Poor Gage only had the sun cover and his jacket to protect him. I’ve never been in a situation before where I had to take the stroller out in poor weather, so I hadn’t thought of it before now.

And yes, it did stop raining about 5 minutes after we reached her class.

[tags]rainy day,preschool,walking in the rain[/tags]

Phew! So nice to be done with all of that. All the getting ready for his party plus actually having it certainly took a lot of time out of my regular work schedule. And then today was Gage’s 2 year doctor appointment.

The party went quite well. Most of the time we’ve barbequed for the kids’ parties, but this year my husband said he was tired of being stuck to the grill so long, so we came up with easier foods to serve. Gave him a lot more freedom to enjoy talking to people.

For me it wasn’t too different than most gatherings. Shy as Gage is, he clung tight to me for much of the party. But he did eventually relax enough to go play with his cousins for a good while, which was a nice break.

We did my usual tradition of baking the cake, and then Gage and Ariel helped to decorate. Gage wasn’t much into it a lot of ways… he just wanted to eat the frosting and the M&Ms we were using to decorate the cake. Read the rest of this entry »

Many states have been considering longer school days, and now Congress is looking to get into the act. I can see good and bad to it, and I’m wondering what other parents think.

The good, of course, is that it means there is more time for activities that schools have been neglecting. I’d love for schools to have enough time for art and music classes, for example, as well as just more time for the kids to play at school.

Many parents who work outside the home would probably also appreciate the extra time that they wouldn’t need to find childcare for.

It would give more time for schools to reach the educational goals set by programs such as No Child Left Behind. I’m not 100% a fan of such programs, as I think it encourages too much teaching to the test, but maybe the extra time could be used to do more than that. I can hope, anyhow. Read the rest of this entry »

Gage for wanting peanut butter on his chicken nuggets, along with ketchup, or me for letting him have it.

He’s just in one of his peanut butter moods today, and apparently peanut butter goes with EVERYTHING. Started out today with nice, normal peanut butter on crackers, but he seems to be in the mood to experiment.

The other experiment today is one I’ve been expecting. We took the side rail off the crib. No nap so far; he finds it all too exciting. But he won’t let us put it back on the crib either. If nothing else, I guess he’ll be really tired come bedtime tonight.

[tags]toddler,experiments[/tags]

I do enjoy seeing what my fellow moms are up to in the blogging world. So many different perspectives. So many crazy children.

No Average Mom is a blog about raising some pretty busy kids. One of the boys is 7 and one of those kids who reads quite a bit, and can learn more than you might be ready for. I’m just waiting for my kids to hit that point.

Candid Quips is a blog about all kinds of topics. It’s divided into categories such as the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, the Sad, the Others… you get the idea. Just a fun read, really.

And me too, of course. Gage’s birthday party is on Sunday, so I’m hoping that everyone is as much on the way to recover as it looks like. Be a real drag to have to call people to say the birthday boy is sick.

This is just an annoying little bug. Mostly kills the appetite with some nausea thrown in for good measure. Other than that and on and off mild fever, you’d hardly know it was there.

Of course, being sick doesn’t give me much of a break. There are supplies to buy, the house to prepare… you know the birthday party prep routine!

If you get into running an online business, one of the challenges is getting your site or sites up and running. You can do it yourself or hire someone.

Once you get the hang of it, using a content management system such as WordPress or Joomla is pretty easy. But making templates can be a lot of work.

There are free templates out there, but unless you want to look like everyone else you’re going to want to customize. For example, I had to figure out how to customize a WordPress template to match the rest of my site for this blog. If you compared it to the original… well, you can see some layout similarities, but I changed it quite significantly. Read the rest of this entry »