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.