It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me. My husband has gone back to work. School has started for my daughter. This whole pregnancy thing.

No wonder my poor son is barely on speaking terms with any of us. He’s just overwhelmed by it all!

His speech therapy started back up today, which I hope will help, but I’ve definitely noticed that with all the changes he is getting more and more reluctant to talk at all. I joke about having to master the art of interpreting interpretive dance, as he prefers to dance around to get my attention when he wants anything, whether it be a snack or company while he goes potty.

And dang it, he used to do that one alone! Now he refuses!

I do think it’s just all the changes. It’s a lot for a 3 year old to absorb, and it’s making him less willing to speak and more clingy. He’s wanting that reassurance that I can give him.

Helping him is a balance between reassuring him that everything’s all right and letting him know that he cannot literally just dance around the subject when he wants something. He has to speak up.

Combining being there for him with encouraging the independence he will need when the baby comes is challenging. I need him to play more on his own so that he’s not so completely shocked by the amount of time a baby takes.

At the same time, I don’t mind letting him be my sweet little boy who loves to snuggle close to Mommy. It’s not always convenient, but it calms him down more than anything.

Now if he’d just let Daddy so much as cuddle him when I’m available! So often if I’m in the same room he won’t tolerate so much as a touch from his Daddy. I’m pretty much looking forward to the Daddy’s boy phase.

I think….

If your kids are anything like mine, hunting bugs is a major pastime. They have their favorites, generally the pill bugs, and ones they know to stay away from, such as the all too common black widow spiders that pretty much infest our area.

Looking for bugs is a great way for younger kids to learn to appreciate nature. You can talk about which ones are beneficial to your yard, and which you’d rather get rid of. And of course discuss rules for problem critters such as black widows or scorpions. My children know to get a grownup for certain kinds of bugs, while others they will try to catch.

I came across an article last night that I think is a good reminder that it’s not just people wanting to work at home who fall for scams. Even professionals who are earning a good living can make big mistakes.

This particular Ponzi scheme was pretty sneaky. It was run using facilities at the University of Miami. They claimed to be selling perfume and electronics to a company in Chili and Peru.

But as with any classic Ponzi, there really wasn’t a product. The numbers were faked, and people earned by recruiting. Accountants, lawyers, business people and retired law enforcement officers all fell for it.

Of course, it wouldn’t have worked if any of these people had let common sense take the place of greed. They were promised a quick 18% return on their investments. One person stands to lose $2 million.

As with any other scam, I take this as a good time to remind everyone to think before you join any opportunity. What are you being promised? What do you have to invest? Are the stated returns on your investment reasonable? Are you paid for recruiting rather than selling?

Taking some time to consider each of these factors, doing your research, and sometimes trusting your gut when it says ‘no’ are all good ways to avoid being scammed.

It’s one of the first rules of looking for a work at home job: “don’t pay for a job.” But when should you consider spending money on your goal to work at home?

For Work at Home Jobs

If you’re definitely thinking in terms of a work at home job, the answer is not quite never. You do not pay for jobs. However, you can sometimes benefit from paying for resources that will help you to get a good job. This very rarely includes paying to join a job board, although one or two, such as Home Job Stop, have legitimate listings. But before you pay for such a board, do your research and see what current users think of it.

Another time is when you are looking to build specialized skills for a job, such as if you are interested in medical transcription. Some jobs you simply cannot get without paying for some training first. This adds on the challenge of finding a legitimate training program (there are scams in training too) to the challenge of not being scammed as you look for a work at home job. But this can be necessary to land certain jobs.

For Your Home Business

And of course you should expect to spend money on your home business. I think a lot of work at home moms find this one to be incredibly challenging. Odds are good that you’re on a tight budget, and the fear of being scammed doesn’t go away when you’re running your own business.

Appropriate spending, however, can help you to grow your business much faster. Some investment is needed to start most home businesses, for example. You may be buying the startup kit for a network marketing opportunity, or you may be buying a domain name and hosting for your website. But either way you’re spending money.

There are many more times when you’ll need to spend on your home business. Just starting up isn’t enough. You need to get the word out somehow, and that means advertising.

If you don’t mind waiting a bit for results, article marketing can work well. It’s highly time consuming and you need to produce quality article for it to really work, but it can drive quite a bit of traffic.

Similarly, marketing on forums can get your link out right away, but you have to do it right and it can take a lot of time to build up a reputation on a forum. You can’t just go dropping ads on a forum and expect it to work. On most the ads would just be deleted, and if not it will probably be buried under tons of other ads in a very short time. Participation, on the other hand, can bring in traffic interested in what you have to offer.

If you want to go a bit more quickly, paid advertising is probably your best bet. You can try pay per click marketing, although I really recommend you read up on how to do that well first. The learning curve is challenging, but you’re paying only for traffic to your site, which can be a good deal. Perry Marshall offers a good product to help you learn.

The key to spending on your home business is that you want to pay only for things that will either bring more sales in for you or help you to learn how to do it yourself in an efficient manner. Many of the ebooks you can buy that will help you learn how to market your business have information you can find elsewhere, but the research time will be tremendous. Spending some money can cut down that learning curve and allow you to improve your profits more quickly.

Knowing when to spend and when to just do it the free way can be challenging. Much depends on your personal goals and finances. Never risk more than you can afford to, but don’t try to build your business without risking nothing at all. Take a chance and see where it leads.

As my children enter that delightful stage where they fight over all sorts of random little things, the time also comes when I have to ponder issues of what’s fair. Kids are great at pointing out when things are unfair.

On the other hand, I don’t want to overdo it. I can still remember as a kid not liking my grandmother’s chocolate chip cookies because she counted out the number of chocolate chips for each one, and just poked them in on top. That was how she handled her kids arguing over who got the most chocolate chips in their cookies.

That’s just not me.

I go more for the philosophy of letting it all balance out over time. I won’t say my kids are always delighted with this idea, but since for every cry of “that’s not fair” I can point out another time when that child got the best of the deal, my kids have a bit of trouble arguing that one with me.

They do try sometimes, of course. My oldest is particularly good at trying to come up with more reasons why things should go her way. Honestly, that pleases me. I want my kids able to stand up for themselves. She may or may not sway me, but she’s trying (sometimes very).

Seriously, I don’t believe you need to treat your kids perfectly equally. They do need to be treated fairly, but from a grown up perspective more so than from their own. You don’t want to build resentment but you don’t want to let your kids determine what’s fair all of the time either.

Sometimes things seem unfair to kids because of age differences. This goes both ways. My son gets mad because his sister, being older, can do some things he can’t. My daughter gets mad when her brother has fewer responsibilities. It seems unfair to each of them, but as any parent knows, you can’t let kids do things inappropriate to their ages.

I also just encourage them to work problems out on their own. I’ll start them on the path to a fair solution, sure, and make sure my daughter doesn’t take excessive advantage of her greater years, but it’s not impossible to teach most kids to figure out fair solutions together.

I hope that this way my kids will grow up understanding that not everything in life will go their way, but they can keep trying. Children should steadily be encouraged to be more independent, so they aren’t expecting their parents to solve every problem that comes their way.