I love working at home. The flexibility is a delight, and even the rough times are pretty good. But it is most definitely not for everyone, not even for all the people who think they want to work from home.

The single biggest challenge for many people is how easy it is to procrastinate. Even people who have been working at home for years can suddenly find it hard to resist this urge. If you aren’t going to be serious about your work, however, you aren’t going to make it in the work at home world.

How do you know if you have a chance?

Success rarely comes easily to those who work at home. It is, after all, work. Often hard work. So start out by thinking about how well you work without someone watching over you. Are you self motivated or do you need someone telling you to get to work?

An early test is how you do when figuring out what it is you want to do to earn money from home. Commit yourself to a schedule for that and see how it goes. The more serious you are about figuring out what it is you want to do from home, the more time it may take you to investigate your options properly… unless you already know what you’re going to do of course.

If you find yourself procrastinating from the start, work hard on breaking that habit immediately. It slows down your path to success, and can keep you from succeeding at all.

Have you talked to your family about it?

Working from home without family support makes succeeding even more difficult. The trouble is that most people know about all the scams associated with it, not about the many very real possibilities to earn a decent amount of money. Then again, sometimes family members just resent the time it takes.

It’s not just the family members in your household that can be at issue. Parents, in-laws, siblings and so forth can be just as unsupportive and make you question what you are doing. While the support of those you actually live with is most important, other opinions can drag you down.

It’s important that you talk about expectations for your efforts with those who are most impacted by what you are doing. If you’re going to be staying up late or getting up early to get work done, your family needs to understand. If you’re going to need quiet time at other hours, once again you will need them to understand. If it’s going to take away from your former free time, the reasons once again will need to be discussed.

While some people do succeed despite others in their family insisting that they’re going to fail or just generally being unsupportive, it is much more difficult. If you want to work from home you should make an effort to get that support.

What are your expectations?

The prospect of working from home seems to fire up all kinds of dreams in people. Some think they ought to be earning $1000/day almost right from the start. I blame the many work at home scams plus the hype from those who do enjoy such wild successes for that.

Thank goodness many people have much more realistic expectations than that.

Your earning potential depends on many factors. The kind of work you will be doing. The effort you put into it. Sometimes even random luck plays a role. Some people chance upon that perfect niche right from the start while others search for years.

The trouble with expecting instant success isn’t just that it puts your expectations too high. It also encourages people to bounce from opportunity to opportunity, without ever really giving things a fair chance to work out. How can you expect to succeed when you don’t give yourself the time to do so?

Excessively high earnings expectations can lead you wide open to flat out scams or merely paying out too much money for information. It’s easy to spend a lot of money on resources that will teach you many of the secrets, but if you’re too eager for immediate success you’re probably not going to take enough time to figure out which ones are legitimate or provide quality information, never mind actually putting the information to good use.

Taking the time to think before you start working at home can really improve your chances of success. There’s no one right way to go about it, but there are many things to be wary of. If you take your time to find the right opportunity and to talk things over with family, you may find that you enjoy what you do tremendously for many years.

When I got my copy of Please Don’t Label My Child, I figured it for a fairly interesting read. While no one professional has tried to tell me either of my kids might have Attention Deficit Disorder or something like it, my inlaws have raised the possibility. I don’t consider it a possibility myself. She’s not the most focused child, but she’s also just 5. I think she just needs time to figure out how to behave at school.

But the more of it I read, the more interested I got. The author included a lot of individual examples where children who others considered to be ADHD or to have other emotional health problems were helped without medications. Should I ever face that kind of thing with my own kids, that’s exactly how I’d want to handle it too.

It’s horrifying when you read about how many kids are being given medications for various behavioral issues. This is an issue that people have been aware of for years, yet too many are willing to just follow a doctor’s advice and use the medications. It’s easier, after all, even though some medications have serious potential side effects. I found this article on it from 2004, in which the spending on behavior modifying drugs had outpaced spending on antibiotics and asthma medications.

That’s just depressing to me.

Please Don’t Label My Child gives some wonderful tips on what else can be done. Consider the circumstances, for example. Of course a child will misbehave if there are current or past problems in his or her life that are not being properly addressed.

Probably my favorite section was on bullying. My daughter had to deal with a classmate who she found rather challenging. She has an active fantasy life while he takes everything seriously and wanted her to do likewise. Just a few words from him and she’d just droop.

Not quite bullying, in my mind, or at least I don’t feel he meant it that way, but it certainly had an impact on her until she learned how to cope with it. This book did help me to think on her reactions to it and how to help her a little.

If you’re a parent, I do very much so recommend this book. You may never face the situation of having someone recommend one of these medications for your child, but why not be prepared for it, in case? You’ll find the insights in general quite interesting.

Destroyer of worlds, hider of eggs. Sometimes it’s hard to go wordless.

Easter isn’t a hectic holiday for all families, but this year it was for mine. My side of the family got together on Saturday at my house. My daughter had a friend’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese that she attended on Saturday night. Then we spent Easter itself with my husband’s parents.

Yep. I’m tired.

And of course, there’s all the Easter candy. The kids got the big chocolate bunnies from my mom, small ones from my husband and I, and small ones from my husband’s parents. Suffice it to say they have more than plenty of chocolate.

So now we’re off to try and recover from all the craziness.

One of the basic rules we have is that each kid can keep their candy separate a few days. After that, it all goes in one bag. They’re actually looking forward to this, since I told them they could smash the big bunnies into pieces at that time. What child doesn’t love destruction? I just have to figure out how to keep it from making a mess all around. Probably have to break them a little myself and throw into a Ziploc first.

There’s a trick to coping with the excess of Easter candy afterward. A couple tricks, I suppose really, and it just depends on what works for your family.

For my kids, they get some candy each day, but still pretty limited. Just less of a limit than usual. The further we get from the holiday, the closer our control of their candy consumption gets to the usual limits.

The candy usually lasts us a few months, especially the chocolate, which ends up in the freezer after being broken into pieces.

Then there’s the real trick… winding the kids back down.

I think it generally works pretty well to get things back onto a normal track as soon as possible after a holiday. The kids are all wound up from the change in routine, and getting them back on routine quickly really seems to help matters most holidays.

This time some of that is pretty easy. My daughter’s school has spring break starting in about 2 weeks, and school does mean some sort of routine is being established for her. I know a lot of schools are doing spring break this week, which of course means more challenges for parents dealing with that.

Today’s routine is pretty much one of relaxation. No friends over today, since there was plenty of social time all weekend for the kids. I might end up watching a friend’s son a few days this week, which will mean changes in our schedule, but since he has a leg injury, the kids won’t be allowed to get too wild around him. I’ve found that a single, really relaxing day does a lot for winding the kids down from an excess of excitement, especially if I also rebuild their routine.

We got our Easter eggs dyed yesterday. I tried the crayon shavings bit just to see how it would go, and it produces decent looking eggs. But I like another method better, that we also tried for the first time this year. It also produces a sort of tie dye effect.

Boil the eggs (of course) and let them cool. Then put a few in a colander and pour a little white vinegar over them. Then get some food coloring and put a drop of one color on each egg.

Roll the eggs around in the colander to spread the color. Allow to set for 30 seconds. Repeat with a second color. Then rinse the excess color off with a little water and put someplace safe to dry.

Two colors is about the most you should do per egg, and I found this to be easier than any egg kit I’ve ever bought. The colors came out more vibrant than I usually get with less effort too. I don’t think I will ever buy an egg dyeing kit again. No point to it.

You can see both types of eggs in the image below. The crayon ones do have nice, bright colors, but I don’t think they turned out nearly so pretty, and they took much more effort.