Playing hangman can be a really great family activity, especially as kids start learning to spell. You can take turns deciding who picks the words and who guesses the letters. Both are good for young spellers.

According to Wikipedia, those who don’t like the concept of drawing a hanging man sometimes switch to drawing apples on a tree, then erasing them as guesses are missed.

There are online versions of hangman as well, but I really prefer the interactive side of playing it in person.

One of the big reasons many moms choose to work at home is so that they don’t have to pay for childcare. It’s a huge savings on the face of it. But would paying for a little childcare allow you to earn enough to make up for it?

It’s not something that all moms want to think about when they decide to work at home. You have your goal of being there for your kids, and it’s hard to say “but I’ll pay someone else for just a few hours so I can really work.”

Is It Fair to Your Family?

Depending on just what you’re doing and how many hours a day you really need to focus on working, it can be too much. Sometimes by far. You really need to be able to figure out whether or not you’re being fair to your family.

Working in spurts as the kids let you can mean you spend more time working and less time with your family than you would by paying for a little childcare. You may not have time to build the focus that you need to really get projects done.

You may also be building your frustration level. Believe me, I know exactly how frustrating it is to get interrupted while working on a project. It’s pretty miserable.

It’s not exactly fun for the kids either to have a mom who is grouchy from being interrupted, or to always be told they have to wait. Hearing that sometimes is fine, even a good thing as kids need to learn that they are not the center of the universe. Hearing that all day, every day isn’t so good.

Is It Fair to Your Marriage?

It’s not just the kids you can be unfair to when you work at home. It’s your marriage. Skip out on making time for your marriage isn’t a good plan.

Working all night, every night, plus all weekend, really doesn’t leave you much time to build your marriage, which really needs to be more important than your business. A supportive spouse is a good thing, but you can take their support too much for granted.

No, putting your husband into daycare isn’t the answer. I doubt the daycare provider would appreciate it. But using childcare enough that you have time for your husband and a break from your business is a good thing.

Is It Fair to You?

If you’re working yourself so hard that you don’t have time for anything else, yet you still struggle to get anything done with your business you probably aren’t being fair to yourself either. Using childcare can mean that you get a break for yourself later on.

Is It Fair to Your Business?

No, your business won’t care if you neglect it or are distracted, but it won’t grow as fast. If you have clients, on the other hand, they will care if you aren’t able to complete in a timely manner the work you agreed to perform.

Only you know exactly how much you want to grow your business. Not everyone wants a multi million dollar income from their business. It can sound nice, but if the work required doesn’t fit into your lifestyle, you probably aren’t going to welcome the idea so much.

But if you’re running a home business you need to be able to reach the goals you do have. If you aren’t working toward them because you need more time for your family, are you being fair to your business?

How Do You Find Childcare?

If you don’t already have a provider, finding one can be a bit tricky. There are services such as Sittercity that can help you to find a caregiver. You can also check for ads in the phone book, talk to friends about who they use or check newspaper ads.

What If You Can’t Afford Childcare?

I know this situation well. It’s not cheap to pay for childcare. But if you’re lucky you have options.

Local family is the best. From my own experience, I can state that retired, local and eager grandparents are absolutely the best. One of the hardest things about moving last year was moving away from my inlaws, who had previously taken my kids overnight once a week most weeks. A hard benefit to lose, as it gave me both work time and time alone with my husband.

If local family isn’t available or isn’t willing, it’s time to start looking at trading childcare with friends. Make friends with the parents of your children’s friends and you can make arrangements to trade care. Many families will appreciate the idea.

This means you will sometimes be caring for extra kids, but if they play well together that can mean you get more work time. Busy children don’t need as much direct supervision after a certain age. That means you’re freer to do what you need to get done.

Whatever you do, find the right balance between caring for your family, your marriage, yourself and building your business. It’s a tough balance, but one you need to figure out.

Reading on some sites, you would think that building an email newsletter is the one true way to build a successful business. It’s true that there are a lot of advantages to having an email newsletter. But you have to figure out if it will work for your business model.

Know Your Goals for Your Newsletter

Before you start a newsletter you should have some goals in mind. It’s not as simple as signing up for a service and dropping the form on your site.

The most obvious goal is to increase your income. Anything else and you’re probably wasting valuable time. But knowing that you want to increase your income isn’t very helpful. You need to know how you’re going to go about it.

Your newsletter often won’t be just an ad. Listing specials is a good thing, but it’s not going to appeal to as wide a crowd as something more informative in many niches.

If you have a network marketing business, for example, your emails can include product specials plus tips on using products, and sometimes a bit about why the opportunity is so great. Your goals then would be to increase both sales and your downline.

Is a Newsletter the Right Model?

There are more ways of building a list than just a newsletter. You may do better with an ecourse in some niches.

This works best if you have a specific goal in mind, and have products you can recommend throughout the course. An ecourse should be very informative and the product highly relevant.

I have a niche like this on one of my sites. A newsletter would take more time than I feel is needed to present the benefits of what is being offered. The ecourse is long enough to give good information to subscribers and to encourage them to buy what I’m offering.

If you go with the ecourse model, remember the saying about it taking about seven exposures to get someone to make a purchase. You will want your course to be at least that long, with no more than a week between lessons.

You can combine a newsletter with an ecourse as well. The course can be the main information needed, with the newsletter allowing you to keep in contact with the list you have built.

Can You Keep Up?

From my own experience, I can tell you that sometimes keeping up with sending out a newsletter is a real pain. It’s not always easy to remember to send it out on time.

Don’t let too long go between emails. Wait a couple months in between and you increase the odds of your messages being labeled as spam.

Subscribers like being able to know when they will get their emails. A sudden increase is going to disturb them in much the same way as a disappearance followed by a reappearance. Be consistent.

Pay for a Quality Service

Strictly speaking, yes, you can run a newsletter list off your own website. But if you’re sending the emails off your computer your ISP may have something to say about the volume, and you’re not going to like it. Get spam complaints and you have trouble with your hosting company too.

And all newsletters get spam complaints, no matter how careful you are about subscriptions. Some people consider it spam as soon as they get bored with the newsletter, and hit the spam key rather than the unsubscribe.

I would suggest paying for either Aweber or GetResponse. They’re both good companies that have been around for a long time. It’s an expense, but one well worth it, knowing that they will handle keeping track of subscriptions, unsubscriptions and spam complaints.

Running a newsletter may or may not be profitable, depending on your niche and how you offer products, but in most markets it’s at least worth a test. Give it a try and remember that a good business goal is to make money by providing quality information or products.

The pressures on moms to be perfect is just amazing. It doesn’t matter what you do, someone will say you’re doing it disastrously wrong. Maybe that’s why it’s such a habit for many moms to gloss over the problems they deal with and try to show a public face of being a really happy mom who can calmly cope with anything life and her kids throw at her.

Even tantrums and finding time for a shower.

I’ll admit some days are easier than others to be a stay at home mom. Keeping my sanity the day after the baby has cut a tooth and was up all night can get interesting. Especially if my feet find the LEGOS on the floor too early in the morning.

There are two key things for moms to remember. Number one is don’t try to be perfect. You aren’t. You don’t want to be.

Number two is to ignore all the people who criticize your little imperfections. They’re not as bad as some people say they are. It’s really not going to make your kids fat and lazy if you sometimes give in and let them have fast food or watch an excess of television.

There’s this little thing called moderation that really means you can get away with so much more than you thought possible. Moderation is a great thing to remind yourself of when you’re feeling bad about your parenting skills. When you’re letting the kids do things that other parents would tell you are unhealthy, will lead to bad habits, whatever, just remember that many things that should not be done habitually are just fine in moderation.

If that doesn’t cover it, try remembering to not sweat the small stuff. Lots of things can be called small stuff if you think far enough ahead.

Never, ever, feel bad for saying you need a break from your kids. You may have this goal of being the perfect stay at home mom who loves every minute, but you need your breaks. We all do. That’s why people who work outside the home get regular 15 minute breaks and a lunch break.

Breaks are a chance to clear your head and relax a little. They’re a bit harder to get for stay at home moms, but you can take breaks and you deserve them.

Get out a little in the evenings or weekends without the kids and without running errands. Do your own thing for just a little while.

Needing time for yourself doesn’t make you a bad mother. Taking time for yourself  can help you to be a better one, in fact.

And if you make a mistake with your kids, don’t be afraid to admit to it. We all make mistakes. You’re a better example for your children if they see that you can not only make mistakes but admit to them.

Forget perfection. Stop trying to be the mom who follows all the rules in whatever parenting style you prefer. Just do the best you can, be yourself and enjoy the ride.

There’s a lot to think about when you’re picking a home business. You’re taking a risk with your time and your money. Not a lot of money with most home businesses, at least compared to what a brick and mortar business would cost, but still a risk. It can be a pretty big deal. You need to consider a lot of factors.

1. Cost.

Whether you’re joining a business opportunity or starting something entirely on your own, consider what it’s going to cost you. You don’t want to risk more than you can afford to lose, especially if you are just after a small supplement to your income.

There is of course something to the old saw about it taking money to make money, and that’s why starting out with something that’s completely free is often the slowest way to start your home business. It’s not impossible to start for free, but the disadvantages can outweigh the advantages, especially if you go for free blogs and such. Paying for your own domain name and hosting gives you a lot more freedom.

2. Viability.

You need to do enough research to be sure that you have at least a chance that the market you’re after is viable. Are there buyers or does everyone want it all for free?

Odds are good that you aren’t starting an entirely unique business. If you are, you’ve just cut your odds of viability way down. But if your business has something in common with other home businesses, you can do some research to make your best guess as to whether or not people are buying that kind of product or service.

Check how many people are in the industry, for example. See if many are buying pay per click ads consistently. Find out how long their websites have been running. These details can give you some pretty good hints as to whether or not the industry is viable.

3. Testimonials.

This is really only relevant if you’re buying into a business opportunity. You don’t have to just go by testimonials on the site. You should be able to contact some of the people who gave testimonials to see what they really think now.

Some sites have used fake testimonials in the past and may continue to do so. It can be hard to tell if it’s a real person or not when the testimonial is from someone called “J. Smith” with no city or website listed. Do not put all of your faith in testimonials.

4. Scam research.

Once again, this has to do with business opportunities. You want to find out if the opportunity is, in fact, a scam.

Many people like to start with the BBB, but that’s really not the best of resources. It can tell you sometimes if a business is no good, but it’s not 100% reliable and many newer opportunities simply will not be listed.

A simple search is the business name plus the word scam; however many businesses have caught on and reviews will be posted asking if the business is a scam and concluding it’s not. Makes figuring things out quite a bit trickier.

Check scam busting websites to see what you can find. While people on these sites can get a bit jaded about home business opportunities they can also be excellent at spotting red flags.

5. Proof of earnings.

Yes, another detail for home business opportunities.

If an opportunity makes income claims, they need to be able to prove it. Many will show the high levels. The FTC now expects all opportunities to also clearly show what average earnings will be. I personally think that’s challenging, as many people who buy into a home business opportunity will never do anything at all with it, making the average extremely low.

6. Passion.

Are you going to love your business or are you going to end up dreading working on it, doing it just because you really, really need the money?

Passion for what you do really helps you to succeed. Your enthusiasm for your business can help you to succeed.

7. Time.

Time can mean a lot of things in home business. Will you have enough time to work on the business? How much time will it take to start showing a profit? How much time will it take from your family? Are there particular hours of the day that you will need to be working so that you are available to customers or clients?

You will want to figure out how the time the business needs will fit into your life. If you don’t have the time to work at it, how are you going to succeed?

Then there’s the amount of time that the opportunity has been around, if you’re joining a network marketing or other home business opportunity. New ones fail quite regularly, but older ones may have a lot of competition in your area. You will want to consider the amount of time they’ve been around, as if the company fails, so does your business.

Starting any kind of a home business isn’t something you should do without thought. Taking a little time to really figure out how you’re going to make it all work improves your chances for success.