[tags]wordless wednesday[/tags]

The holiday season’s traditional kickoff days are rapidly approaching. The day after Thanksgiving is huge for retailers in the real world, while online the Monday following is far better. The beauty of it if you’re trying to save money is that a lot of retailers offer special deals to encourage you to shop on those days.

Now, I’m no fan of shopping anytime on Thanksgiving weekend. Six years in retail took all interest in that out of me. Fortunately many good deals are available online and today I thought I would try to find some of them for you, knowing that parents have a lot of people to shop for.

Amazon.com, for example, has a sale on Black Friday only. As they say, no waiting in line, which has to be a good thing. They also have a Thanksgiving sale that is going on now through November 26, 2007 on various housewares.

If you or someone you know needs software, Adobe has a page with all their current special offers on it. Right now Adobe Photoshop Elements has a $25 discount and free shipping, for example.

Buy.com has MP3 Players under $100, a deal that expires 11/30/07. They also have 10% off Amazon’s prices on over 900,000 books.

If you like to get creative with your gifts and share photographs, Photoworks now has 10% off your entire order if you enter the coupon code PW10OFF.

The LEGO website is offering free shipping on orders of $99 or more, which is probably pretty easy if you have a few kids to shop for. I’m just delighted that my daughter is finally big enough to think about getting her the smaller LEGO bricks, even if I don’t look forward to stepping on them!

You can also visit Brookstone’s holiday gifts page for great holiday deals. My husband loves wandering through Brookstone any chance he gets, and pretty much feels that I could buy him anything there and he’d like it. Not quite, but it’s pretty close.

There are of course many more deals out there, and plenty of sites willing to tell you all about them. Hopefully there will be some deals on the things you’re looking for this holiday season.

[tags]black friday,cyber monday,holiday shopping,christmas shopping[/tags]

With the holidays approaching, I’m feeling more and more of that old conflict – work vs. family time. Sometimes it’s really hard to decide to take some time off.

This weekend, I chose the time off and it was fun. A few hours at Sea World, a few hours figuring out outdoor Christmas decorations. All in all, it was a fun day.

But as the obligations and events pile up, it gets hard to not wish for more work time. How do you balance family and holiday and work time when you work at home?

This is harder for people who work at home than for people who work outside the home, because our work is often not as well understood.

Sometimes the answer is to just take the time off. Time for family, including extended family, is important. One of the benefits of working at home is that you can do that when you want to.

But you can’t overdo it. Going so far as to neglect your home business isn’t a good plan. Finding a balance that works for the holiday season is important.

A lot of this depends on the kind of work you do at home. If you get a lot of holiday business or your workload otherwise increases during the holidays, you’re going to have to keep to a stricter schedule than you would if your workload decreases during the holidays.

Family time isn’t necessarily relaxing, nor are the holidays. But even when it’s draining, there’s something about taking time to enjoy the holidays with the people you care about that really helps in the long run.

[tags]family time,holidays,kids,children,working at home,wahm,sahm[/tags]

There’s an article on MSN on how changing the name you call a food changes the perception. The first part is how it works on adults, but they do end with its impact on kids.

I already knew that. There’s a reason why one of my kids’ favorite recipes is called Sand and Shells. It makes a dish based on cracked wheat and pasta a lot more fun.

But it is something to think about when you have picky eaters, and after reading this I may have to try more of this on my son at dinnertime. He eats every other meal well, but dinner is a challenge for some reason, even if he loves the food we’re having and he hasn’t had any snacks since before his nap.

[tags]food names,picky eaters,kids,children,eating,food[/tags]

The holidays are an expensive time of year, on the whole. All the food, presents and travel really add up. But if you can stock up for other parts of the year, it can be a great time to do so.

For example, even though I’m not hosting Thanksgiving in my home, I bought a turkey. How often do you have a chance to get meat at $0.39 a pound? And a lot of other foods that you can stock up on may go on great sales as well.

Much as turkey can get boring long before the whole bird is gone. I generally find a good range of ways to use it. It makes fair stir fry, especially spiced up with turmeric or other spices that really change up the flavor.

The hard part, of course, is that a lot of Thanksgiving dinner ingredients are fresh, and not so easily frozen. But you can find some things to stock up on to save a bit in the long run.