The Value of Childcare

Most people figure that they’ll be able to save on childcare costs by working at home. While this is certainly possible, you may find that it is still worth it to hire someone to look after your kids. It all boils down to basic math.

How much can you earn while you are watching your kids? It is probably considerably less than when you have no children begging for snacks or asking for  glass of water every few minutes. While I do appreciate my kids getting me out of my chair on a very regular basis to prevent those blood clots we hear so much about, there is no doubt that this cuts into productivity.

For those work at home moms who have kids in school, you probably have a good idea of just how productive you are sans children. Maybe you even get your work done in those hours while they’re away. However, if you have small children in the home or homeschool, you might need to sneak away for a couple of hours to see just how productive you can be.

Now, take a look at the equation below and plug in your own numbers.

$ earned per hour WITHOUT kids – $ earned per hour WITH kids = ??

In some cases, you won’t actually earn considerably more per hour and so it may not be worth hiring a sitter or nanny or putting kids in daycare for a couple of hours. However, if you are making more than $10 an hour more, it could well be worth your while to have someone else watch the kids from time to time. Yes, we work from home to be with them, but it’s good to get a break, too!

What are your thoughts on childcare when you work from home?

Activities to Keep Your Children Mentally Engaged Over the Summer

Between sleeping in, splashing around at the beach, and no school, summer break is many kids’ favorite time of the year. However, after a few months of fun in the sun, a lot of people feel as though their kids have lost much of the information they learned through the school year. This is why it is important for you to find ways to keep them mentally engaged over the summer. With these stimulating, fun and educational activities, you can help your children stay sharp, and maybe even get them ready to enter the school’s science fair next year.

1. Backyard Garden
This activity is a great way for your kids to get some light exercise, cut down your grocery bill, and learn – all while having fun! Buy seed packets for a hardy plant, like tomatoes or cucumbers. Then gather three types of different soil. For example, you can use a loamy soil, a sandy soil and the soil that is natural to your area. Then, get six pots that are large enough for the vegetable you choose, or mark off six plots in your garden, and fill two of each plot or pot with each type of soil. To add another variable, you and your child can go hunting for earthworms after a summer rain shower and place them in half of the plots, and leave the other half without them. Next, label each of the plots 1-6 and note the kind of soil used and if earth worms were added. The last step is to plant the seeds and water them as recommended by the instructions on the seed packet or online.

Soon, seedlings should start to grow. Every other day, your child should go outside with a notebook, ruler and magnifying glass. They can measure and track how tall and how fast the different plants are growing, the color of the leaves, and later in the summer, the quality and quantity of the fruit. If they want, they can turn all of this data into graphs then write up which plants grew best with which soil, and if the earthworms may have helped them grow better. Presenting this can make a great extra credit project for their science class next year, or even help earn a first place price at the science fair!

2. Kite building
Not only is flying kites on a breezy day a favorite summer past time, but constructing them can be a fun and educational project. There are hundreds of tutorials available online that cover different methods and materials of building your own kite. As your child successfully builds kites by following these, they should take note of which fly best and the materials and shapes used to build them. Once your child has built and flown a few kites, the real fun and creativity can begin. They can start alternating shapes and materials, and creating their own original kites without instructions. As they change the shapes and materials, they should keep track of which ones can fly the highest, are the most stable, and if they are feeling adventurous, which ones can do the best tricks and flips. As they get more interested in kite building, you may find them learning about aerodynamics and physics.

A fun way to make each kite even more exciting is to decorate it with tassels, stickers and drawings — although they will quickly learn it is important to be careful about the kite’s weight. For example, they could create a Batman themed kite that is shaped like a bat and black and yellow. While they fly it, they could even wear matching Batman pajamas or a costume.

3. Cooking

Cooking and baking are exact sciences. They require perfect temperatures, mixtures, and timing to get the desired outcome. Beyond that, they also require reading comprehension, knowledge of measurements, and some math to follow the recipes. At least once a week, help your child choose a recipe for one of their favorite foods, and then go with them to the grocery store so they can gather the ingredients. Depending on how old your child is, you can make the recipes easier or more difficult. For example, providing them with a cookbook that uses metric measurements, but only giving them customary measuring tools will help them learn how to convert between the two systems. You could also require that the dishes be larger or smaller than in the recipe book, so that they can learn about ratios and fractions.

As your child gets better at cooking, the recipes and requirements can get harder. Fortunately, towards the end of the summer, the garden should be ripening, and your child will probably have a great time incorporating the literal fruits of their labors into their dishes. As a final project, your kid can create their own recipes with their own vegetables, and provide the family with a homemade and grown dinner and dessert.

Few kids don’t love their summer vacations, but keeping them engaged and learning without summer school can be tricky. However, with high flying kites, slimy earthworms, delicious desserts and home grown gardens, they can have an amazing, active and educational summer!

How Many Baskets Are Your Eggs In?

Very recently, Squidoo experienced a drop in traffic and has been frantically changing things to try and get back in Google’s good graces. It’s quite the mess at the moment on the site and while I still write there on occasion, I have been working harder on my other sources of income. It’s something that I have been working on for a while . . . putting my eggs in a bunch of different baskets.

When all your money comes from one primary source, you are in serious trouble if that source fails. It can be devastating and while you should certainly have savings, the best method is to have money coming in from several places. This is particularly important if you are a freelancer. For example, I write and so I use Squidoo as my primary source of income. However, I also have books on Kindle and write articles for Constant Content. Now, I am also branching out into other areas such as Wizzley, Seekyt, Zujava and InfoBarrel to have some minor money coming in. It takes minimal effort to write several extra articles on the same topic, so this could be a good way to bring in a little extra money through Amazon and AdWords.

I’m fairly new to most of the above sites, so I’ll update once I see how viable they are. In the meantime, I’ll continue to publish books and work on Constant Content.

No matter what your profession, you should be able to ensure that you have some sort of income from more than one place. Whether you do that through a side business or investing, it’s always a good plan to keep your options open and to have a backup plan if everything goes south.

Creating Products: Is It the Next Big Thing?

I don’t know about you, but my inbox these days is FULL of emails offering the ultimate tips in product creation, ebook writing, etc. This seems to be the big fad at the moment. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I have written several books and have them published on Amazon. So, I think that writing a book is a great idea.

The reality is that you aren’t necessarily going to be making a ton of money right off the bat. You can’t just publish a book and expect millions to buy it. However, I have been pretty surprised by how many sales I make without marketing my books much at all. One of my pen names makes around $50 a month without any promo at all. That being said, I don’t make much more than that in total, so it’s not a get rich scheme and I never expected it to be.

I think the problem with the recent training systems being offered is that they tend to promise the moon. And you only have to pay $197, $297, or $577!!! Which makes me wonder just how much is really being made on books and how much is being made on courses.

While diversifying your income is always a good idea, writing a book about what you do or what you are an expert in is not a new idea. In fact, business people have been doing it for decades. Before the Kindle, we published ebooks. While the Kindle makes things insanely easy, this isn’t a new technique. So, yes, I think it’s a great way to go, but I really don’t see it as all that new.

What are your thoughts on all this training? Have you written a book or purchased a training system to do so?

Work at Home Moms Who Homeschool

Working from home is a huge undertaking when you have children. If you’ve decided to work at home AND homeschool, then you have an even bigger job ahead of you. I am the primary breadwinner in our house and I’m also the primary educator of our two school age boys. Teaching Grade 1 and 2 while handling a baby and getting writing done is a bit more difficult than I imagined. I’m not sure if it’s the going from 2-3 kids or if it is just the harder coursework this year, but things are definitely challenging.

In hopes of finding some inspiration from other homeschooling WAHMs, I started doing a bit of investigating on the web. Turns out there are quite a few of us out there! Here are a couple of posts that I found very useful.

Jimmie over at Jimmie’s College recently wrote a post titled “I Can’t Homeschool Because I’m a Work at Home Mom.” It is a very comprehensive post on how to make it all work and I think it ought to be required reading for any homeschooling wahm.  Highlights include:

Homemaking and money making both have to happen. It makes more sense for children to do more housework to free you for profitable work. While children complete simpler tasks such as dishes and laundry, you can be earning money to buy groceries.

If you are going to be a WAHM who homeschools, you have to actuallyhomeschool. That means that you plan it into your schedule just like you plan for meals and for your clients or work tasks.

Victoria at Snail Pace Transformations wrote throughout October on “31 Days of Time Saving Tips for the Homeschooling WAHM”. There are 31 posts, each with a specialized tip on it. Again, highly recommended reading for moms who work and homeschool. Highlights:

Our family homeschooling goal is to raise independent learners.

I prefer the word “helpers” for my children than “servants”. They help me get a lot done, and in trade for training them I am ensuring that they will enter adulthood with the skills of managing a home tucked in their tool belts.

At Simple Homeschool, Hillary wrote a post, “Working at Home & Homeschooling: 7 Life Lessons from a WAHM,” that covers the most important lessons she learned from homeschooling while running two home businesses. Here are a couple bits that I found particularly useful:

We’ve found, without exception, when we put work first and kids second nothing gets accomplished.

You might have to make peace with a messy house or give up the dream of a big garden.

Do you have any advice to add for homeschooling WAHMs? Feel free to share your tips in the comments.

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