Or camping in the living room, if you don’t have a back yard. Don’t want to leave the apartment and condo dwellers out.

Set up the tent and have a nice little campout. Fire up the grill for dinner and don’t forget the s’mores!

Tell stories, talk, do the usual camping stuff, but from home.

If you don’t have a tent you can fake it in the living room. How often do kids want to set a tent up for playing? Use some chairs and a sheet, or get more creative, and you have a quick tent to sleep in. Doesn’t work so well outside, but since we’re trying to keep to things you have on hand, buying a tent is something you should do only if you’re going to be using it anyhow.

I found out from the CDC that this week is Hurricane Preparedness Week. While hurricanes aren’t a problem where I live, I know a lot of people do have to consider them. I get less warning for my natural disasters – earthquakes. But I still keep disaster supplies on hand for those.

Their website has a variety of tips on how you can prepare your family for a hurricane. These include preparing for a hurricane, emergency supplies you should keep on hand, tips on if you are ordered to evacuate, and more.

Hurricane season begins June 1, so they’re really trying to get people along coasts that get hit by hurricanes to prepare in advance. Much better to be ready than to have to fight the crowds when the warning is given.

Let’s all hope for a mild hurricane season.

One of my biggest challenges right now in working at home is dealing with my 3 year old son. He’s in a massively clingy phase right now.

Not just out in public, although that makes it worse. All day long, even at home.

He can be distracted for a time, sure. Turn the TV on and he’s happy. But I can’t let him do that all day. I have to get more creative if I’m going to satisfy myself that I’m still working at home for the right reasons.

Let Him Cling

One of the simplest ways to get him to not cling is to let him. I let him show me what it is he wants from me. I play with him. I give him some of the time that he wants from me in the hopes that he will give me some quiet time later.

Plus it means I can help to tire him out so he’ll take a good nap later. If he’s asleep he’s not clinging, after all.

Tell Husband to Help

When my husband is home (a lot right now since his layoff), I make sure he gets involved. It doesn’t matter that my son tries to insist that only Mommy is good enough. We insist that he learn to accept help and do fun things with either of us.

You’d be amazed at how much he (my son) can resist this idea. But I think it’s important.

Get Some Time Out of the House

With gas prices the way they are right now, this doesn’t happen much unless I’m running errands. Most times my errands are a kid-free time for me. It’s a nice semi-break. Can’t call it a real one since I’m still doing something for my family. But it does help to ease the stress of always being on call.

Send Him Outside

The one thing that holds my son’s attention better than the television is the outdoors. He will cheerfully spend an hour collecting pill bugs and ladybugs. Without me around most of the time. I can just check on him out my office window.

With summer coming I do have to make sure he wears his sunscreen and that he doesn’t stay out too long if the day is particularly warm. Young children aren’t always going to be aware of what their bodies need.

Work Around His Schedule

I do a lot of work late, late at night. That way both of my kids are asleep, and once again there’s no clingy issue, aside from occasionally with my husband. Not saying that’s all bad, of course!

It takes some extra effort to not be completely exhausted at the end of the day when you work around a clingy child, but it can be done. Spend some time figuring out what routines work for you. And share tips if you have them!

I’ve had a section for people to advertise their direct sales and network marketing opportunities on here for a long time. But I did it all manually, which was tedious and all too easy to forget about.

I’ve upgraded it now to a proper directory.

Just as before, you can get links to your opportunity for free. I have also added a Featured Links option so that if you want your link to be above everyone else’s in your opportunity you have the chance to do so. Only a limited number for each, and it’s a monthly subscription so that if someone loses interest they aren’t tying the spot up forever.

There’s plenty of space available; I used to keep it to just one rep per company, but with this new directory everything is split out by company rather than just category. Write your ad to appeal to those who are looking at the opportunity you represent for the best results. I’m not limiting the number of free links; only the Featured ones.

Going to try a new feature here – fun and free things to do, posted on Fridays. There may be the cost of getting there or for food you bring, but these are idea where there’s no entry free. And you have to eat sometime anyhow.

This week’s idea is to go on a family picnic. Pack up some lunches or even dinner, and find a park, a beach or even your backyard.

Bring toys or sports equipment so you can play as a family.

Take your time and let the family picnic be about having fun together. Don’t stress about what the house looks like or any work you need to get done. Just take the time to be a family.

I had one of those “wow!” moments when I was grocery shopping yesterday. I’ve been hearing a lot about the price of rice going up; yesterday I saw it.

The last time I went shopping at my local Henry’s, jasmine rice (my husband’s preferred type) was $0.99/lb. This week it was $1.99.

Yes, doubled. Other types of rice had similarly increased.

My husband’s thinking he may go to Costco today to check out their prices. We aren’t in urgent need or anything, but he’s curious. The last time he checked there, they were out.

Of course, our current situation makes stocking up really difficult. He’s still looking for that new job. Callbacks are hard to get right now for even a first interview.

I could see a lot of other prices were up too. It’s getting pretty interesting trying to find food at good prices anymore. Hopefully the garden will be nicely productive this summer.

I’ve seen people talk sometimes about having a no-spend day. They buy nothing that day. It can be a help, certainly, if you tend to buy something every day. But if you’re like me, working at home all the time, it’s not going to change your spending habits that much.

In some sense, of course, you do spend every day. The food you eat was bought at some point, and it certainly costs you something when you consume it. There’s the cost of your housing. Any subscriptions you have, whether to a magazine, your cable television, even power and telephone bills.

However, if those little daily purchases are eating up your income, having no-spend days regularly can really help. You can have the kids bring lunch to school instead of using money to buy it. You can eat at home rather than eating out, or bring lunch if you have to go to work. Odds are these will save you over eating out, although school lunches may be pretty cheap.

The idea can be extended to the shopping you do need to do. No-spend can be no impulse purchases when you’re at the grocery store. Stick to your list instead.

Take the idea of not spending, and apply it to the various times that you do need to spend. If you have the habit of buying lots of little stuff you don’t really need, it can help more than you might expect.

As a work at home parent, one of the things I find most challenging is deciding what my time is worth. I don’t do freelance work often, but when I do it is very easy for me to ask for too little. It’s a part of why I don’t like to work for others.

There’s a very popular article on the Wall Street Journal site about stay at home moms who used to be executives being available for temp work. Only trouble is, they too value their work too little. I mean sometimes a tenth or less of what they earned as full time executives.

I love that so many opportunities are opening up to stay at home moms to maintain their careers, but I wish more would demand what they are worth.

There was a news story in my area a couple months back about companies that specialize in finding temp work for at home moms. I didn’t catch the name then, but there are a couple of options out there. MomCorps is the one I’ve been hearing about since then.

It’s a common problem for many women. They don’t value their skills enough, especially if they’re working from home for just a little extra income or to keep up with their industry. Yet the value provided is typically equal to what someone more traditionally employed might offer.

What Should You Do?

It’s hard to not undervalue yourself, especially if you start from the point of “I’m just a stay at home mom”.

Odds are you’re more than that.

Employers may have the expectation right now that at home moms will accept less, and so it may take time to change that, but don’t go for bottom of the barrel pay. If your work was worth more before you started staying at home, it’s probably worth more now.

Keep in mind that many people get better clients when they ask for better pay. The perceived value of what you’re offering is higher. If you don’t ask for what you’re worth, many potential clients will wonder why.

If you think you haven’t been asking for enough, challenge yourself. Start asking for more. You may get some pleasant surprises.

Summer, so far as I’m concerned, is here already. We’ve been breaking 100 degrees F every day since Friday. Go ahead, tell me it’s not summer. I won’t believe you!

Now the biggest trouble to me with this kind of weather is that it’s hard to keep the kids busy. My usual routine of booting them out of the house doesn’t work so well when the back yard doesn’t have a single tree to help keep them cool. If we had known we’d be renting here this long we would have changed that, but as things stand, we’re stuck with no trees and one hot back yard.

And there’s only so much we can do with sprinklers or other water fun. We’re really short on water, and the city has been campaigning hard to get people to cut their daily water usage by at least 20%. While we can combine watering the lawn with letting the kids play sometimes, we can’t do that daily.

So the challenge becomes how to keep the kids busy indoors without just leaving the TV on all day.

We started things out with some rules on TV watching, though. Each of the kids is allowed to pick a certain number of shows per day. They can watch each others’ shows, but when my daughter goes to school she misses my son’s picks, and he generally misses her after school picks due to his nap. Keeps their individual total screen times down.

I encourage a lot of creative play. The kids have rediscovered their wooden train set. Start a competition to clean up after, and it even gets off the floor quickly in the end too.

The kids have a little table set up for homework and crafts. It gets some fair use right now.

But what gets the most regular use? The shave ice maker.

This thing was the biggest hit at my daughter’s birthday party. The kids barely cared about the cake – shaved ice was available. And my kids are asking for it pretty much daily too.

Ours is just a hand crank model. We’ve had it since my first pregnancy, a way to be sure that if they weren’t going to let me eat when I was in the hospital I could have some flavored ice, which they had said was fine. We didn’t actually use it there, or even remember to bring it, but that was the idea.

One thing I’ve been trying to figure out is healthier flavorings for the ice. The usual stuff is just full of corn syrup. You can’t avoid having a lot of sugar in the syrups, though. But at least the amount of syrup is much smaller than the amount of ice!

My husband has been battling a clog in the kitchen sink all day today. Nothing will make that thing budge for him. We’ve called the landlord for a plumber but you know how that can take a while, especially since landlord’s do-it-yourselfer husband was out when we called.

But I really think these things are contagious. You see, yesterday we were at my mother’s house. Her bathroom sink is badly clogged. So it’s only natural that we would get a sink clogging too, although I hope our situation isn’t so bad. She’s looking at needing to replace a lot of her plumbing in the bathroom, and she’ll be checking to see how the rest of the house looks.

This isn’t a first for us, though.

Last time it was the washing machine. My in-laws washing machine broke just days before ours did. I had a lot of fun teasing my mother-in-law that it was all her fault for telling me about it over the phone. Clearly our machine overheard her.

For now, we’re trying to decide if we want to cook dinner at home. It’s about 96 degrees F out, so really, really hot for cooking, but with my husband not working, it doesn’t make any sense at all to eat out. But then what about dishes? Bathroom sinks aren’t terribly friendly to doing the dishes.