This is just a quick note to let all my readers know about an opportunity to learn how to write sales copy. If you are working from home in any type of sales business, it is imperative to know how to write sales letters that work. You want to write copy that compels people to act, to call or to purchase. Take a look at this link. It is a 3-part series of training calls with an expert in the field of writing sales copy. Click here to go to the link.

There was recently an interview on Fox News with Dr. Andrea Pennington, author of The Pennington Plan, which focused on the foundation of good health as the first step in becoming reconnected with oneself. Dr. Pennington talks about the importance for women (in particular) to be in touch with their passions in life. She advocates beginning with your physical health. Nutrition, exercise etc…are often neglected when a woman is focused on raising her children, caring for her family and often earning a living as well.

Dr. Pennington’s focus is similar to the main objective of this website. Homeschooling is a huge time committment, as is working at home. Structuring your life in a way that allows time and space for self-care is all the more important when demands on your time and space are high. You can view Dr. Pennington’s interview on Fox News by clicking here. (There is a link in the sidebar of this website, to the antioxidant juice that Dr. Pennington mentions in her interview.)

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Meditation is an interesting topic for this blog. The power of meditation for yourself, your children and your business can be quite amazing. As someone who has experienced that power from years of daily meditation I can highly recommend it for busy parents and their children.

Bringing children into meditation and allowing it to become something that they treasure and value can begin in a number of ways. There of course are families where the children have experience with meditating since newborn days…families where they rested nearby while their parents did their practice. These children may see a meditation practice as something normally done, like dinner or brushing teeth. Children who have not had this experience might love to start doing a type of family meditation.

Spending time with your children developing what your family meditation practice looks like, is a beneficial and also creative process. Your practice can be a simple as sitting together once a day and breathing, to a more elaborate ritual of chanting, breathing, prayers and blessings. If you as the parent have had no prior meditation experience, you will find it helpful to first read some books or listen to some meditation tapes. An author like Jon Kabat-Zinn is very accessible and easy to read. Once you have created a family meditation practice, the move to children meditating on their own as they mature, will be a natural one.

From the standpoint of a homeschooling parent working at home, meditation can be a lifeline. Ours is a busy day. Knowing that at some point in that day everything will become quiet, the focus will turn inward and we will have a moment to reconnect with our inner-self, can be all we need to push through the math problems or return that difficult client’s phone call. Meditation created space. A daily practice creates a space with no expectations and no demands. The breath continues inward and outward regardless. No matter what your day has wrought or what it’s about to bring, meditating allows you to spend time in this one moment. Doing so can allow you to re-enter with more patience, more motivation and more focus. That is truly a gift. A gift for yourself, your children and your business.

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Computers. They were meant to be a timesaver and a paper saver. They are neither. If you work at home they are a necessity. Your kids need them eventually for research, word processing, and most importantly to be computer literate in the 21st century. How do you create balance with the computer? It’s an important question.

There are so many computer programs available for children. Is it good to let our children spend time on the computer? How much time? Recent brain research is showing that young children would be much better off staying away from screen viewing. This includes TV’s, computers and video games. The young brain needs to getting it’s stimulation from the real world. Counting pennies on the floor is much better for you the young developing brain than counting pennies pictured on a screen. Watching a real tadpole turn into a frog, or a butterfly hatch from a crysalis makes more sense than watching a video of the same events.

Yet, you work at home and you spend time on the computer. Your children see you spending time on the computer. They want to do what you do. And there you have it. So choose wisely. There are computer games that mimic guns and war. There are games that require reading and math. Choose wisely. Just because you’ve heard about it somewhere from someone doesn’t mean it fits in with your values and beliefs about what your children should be exposed to. Limit the time. Thirty minutes at the computer for a young child is plenty.

As your child gets older he/she will do research on the computer. Make sure you’ve set your filters. It’s amazing will google will take you (or your child) if you’re not careful. Spend the time you need learning how to get to relevant research sites and then show them to your child. Anyone can write an article about anything, on the internet, and have it show up when you search. Look instead for educational sites, or sites sponsored by organizations that have a good reputation, like PBS, or National Geographic. As a homeschooling parent you are going to need to teach your child how to find relevant, academically generated information on the internet and separate it from all the fluff.

The computer is a tool that is increasingly necessary in our 21st century world. Learn to use it with respect for what it offers and with respect for your own body and balance. Teach your children to do the same.

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The beauty of homeschooling and having your own home based business is that you can take it all with you. Your schedule is yours. No school vacations to plan around. No keeping track of your vacation days for the year. In our crazy culture of over-scheduling this is quite refreshing. What’s funny about self-employed people, especially those of us who work out of our homes, is that it’s often harder to take a break than it is for people working for someone else. There’s always something more to do and there’s usually no one else to do it.

As for homeschooling…That’s the easy one in my opinion. If you start with the premise that children are always learning and build on that fact, it becomes simple. If you use a homeschool curriculum, you can take it with you anywhere you go. If you lean more towards contextual learning, then the location of your travels will inform what you focus on while you’re there. If you’re an unschooler, your children will find myriads of things that peak their interests and their imagination while in a new environment. If you’re a planner, try and read some books about where you’re heading before you go. Let your kids read up on the sights to see or the historical significance of the area. Give them a map and let them locate routes from where you’re staying to the attractions you want to visit.

As for you work at home workaholics, try a few days away from your cell phone and computer. As someone who spends at least 3-5 hours per day working on my multiple businesses on the compute, that’s a hard one. I believe I should be thankful that I have not yet graduated to a lap top. I need to leave my computer at home during my Thanksgiving vacation. I may have to sneak away to a local library a couple of times, but overall the computer and I are both going to get a much needed break from each other. Remember I spoke about balance in an earlier post? Part of balance is letting the work go and enjoying a vacation without checking in. We’ll see how it goes.

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In the last post we spoke about the power of patience. Patience with your children, patience with yourself and patience with your business. Branching off into the parenting theme for a moment, let’s focus on intention..or being intentional in your parenting.

As homeschooling parents we have already been intentional. We have intentionally looked inside ourselves and outside at the public and private educational choices and we have intentionally decided to homeschool our children. People how choose to homeschool do so for a large variety of reasons. If you look at those reasons it becomes apparent that at some point they are closely related to a family’s values and belief system. As homeschooling parents we have taken the time and the energy to really look at our values and our beliefs and to make a statement about how we want our children educated. We make that statement by our actions—by choosing to homeschool.

Intentional parenting is all about making conscious choices about how we parent, based on our values, our beliefs, and our dreams and goals for our children and our families. Once we become clear about these things within ourselves and with our partners, we can then focus on how to parent in a way that meshes relatively seamlessly with who we are. Mahatma Ghandi once stated, “My life is my message”. What you do and how you do it is the strongest message you give about who you are and what you deem important. That is the message that your children “hear”.

If you’d like to read an article called Introduction to Intentional Parenting, just fill in your email below and hit submit and it will be sent to you almost immediately.

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Patience. If you are homeschooling your children you know about patience, or at least people think you do. How many times have you heard, “You’re homeschooling your children? I couldn’t do that. You must be so patient.” Maybe we are. Certainly all of us who homeschool eventually get to a point where we have systems and routines that work and chaos at a tolerable distance.

When you work at home and have your children home with you everyday as well, an addition need for patience comes into play. Not only do you need to teach your children or supervise their learning, but you need to spend time on your business while teaching and supervising their learning. There are an assortment of ways to do this.

With young children you may just need to work while they are napping or after they go to bed at night. Sometimes setting up an art project while playing a book on tape will give you a good hour to work. Personally, there are things I can get done in an hour, but if I really need to concentrate I need to know I have a good chunk of uninterrupted time. With younger children it’s wonderful to set up some trades with other work at home or homeschooling families. This way you know that every wednesday afternoon your house will be quiet and you can focus for a number of hours.

As your children become older, school and work time can be combined. It is such a gift to teach your children to become independent learners. This means that there will often be times when they are doing their work and you can do yours. Not only will your children benefit by needing to become responsible for their own learning, but they will also benefit by observing your commitment to your work. In that way, everyone working on their own projects creates real meaning for you and for children.

So back to patience. In our situation it will be rare to have the luxury of multiple days in a row will multiple uninterrupted hours to focus. For me, when I’m working on a new project I often feel compelled to do it all as quickly as possible. This leads to unbalance in my life, mostly because I stay up very late working which then results in a less than adequate night’s sleep. A tired mom is no good to anyone, least of all herself. It comes back to patience. It comes back to remembering that I am self-employed so that I can work in a way that fits well with my family and maintains balance for myself and for them. It’s my own project. I can do it in two days or ten. Either way, it will get done. Patience with myself is crucial here. Taking a breath and allowing the project to unfold at a pace that makes sense in the context of my other responsibilities.

This is a hard one for many people. Often those of us who work at home are the type of people who have the internal drive and desire to succeed outside of the structure of the “workplace”. Patience. Breathe. Patience. Please comment!!

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The article below was written by Molly Gordon, who has a website that can be found at www.authenticpromotion.com

Work Life Balance and Self-Care, Whether you Deserve It or Not, by Molly Gordon, MCC

Do you ration the self-care you need to maintain work life balance based on how well you have behaved or performed lately or how much you have left to do? If so, you run the risk of running out of gas in the middle of the night on a deserted highway.

The image is vivid, yet it can still be difficult to care for ourselves and for each other when we lose work life balance getting caught in a frantic pattern of busy-ness. It can even be hard to get enough perspective to acknowledge that we are running in circles and on empty.

I’m no stranger to these difficulties, and I have good news. Even the most frenetic busybody can learn to treat herself at least as well as she would treat her car.

1. Make a list of things that fill your tank, without which you cannot expect to function as a loving human being. For example: Exercise; eating well; prayer and meditation; petting the cat; eight hours of sleep. If you are really stuck in busy-ness, ask a friend to gently point out what you are overlooking.

Keeping gas in the tank is a non-negotiable precondition to being able to drive. It needs to be tended to every day. Take a few minutes to fully appreciate that when you skip these things you are running on fumes. With this in mind, make the decision that these tank-filling activities are the functional equivalent of work and will no longer be treated as optional extras or self indulgence.

2. Make a list of things that are akin to getting the oil changed in your car. These do not need to be tended to as often, yet, when you are honest with yourself, you will find that know what the appropriate intervals are. Schedule them into your calendar and keep your commitments. Breaking these commitments reduces the life of your engine! Examples might include getting a bi-weekly massage or having your teeth cleaned every six months.

3. List those things that are the equivalent of getting a car wash. Strictly speaking, these items may not have a direct effect on your car’s performance, but it sure seems to run better and it is definitely more fun to drive. (In my family, we call a good car wash the poor man’s tune-up.) For me, a visit to the hot tubs, a pedicure or a haircut fall into this category.

The above examples are of personal self care. How about doing this exercise with your mate or with the whole family as the basis for setting priorities for the future? How would establishing these priorities affect your ability to enjoy work life balance?

The ideas in this article are a good place to start in your quest to balance all the busy-ness.

If you’d like to receive emails or be notified on your homepage every time we add new information or a new post, please fill out the form below and hit submit. We have a strict privacy policy and will NEVER share your information with anyone.

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Most work at home moms want to know, “How do I do it all?!” Add to that the demands (and joys) of homeschooling your children and it’s obvious that there’s a lot on that plate. What often gets lost on this plate is self-care. When does mom exercise? Does she feed herself when she prepares food for the rest of the family, or when doing a cooking lesson with her children? If she’s like many moms I know she often plans on better self-care and then realizes at 10:00PM that she didn’t quite get to it AGAIN.

A basic axiom of problem solving is to start with identifying the problem. It appears we’ve begun to do that in the paragraph above. A simply stated definition of the problem might be: It is very difficult to find time in the day for self-care when a mom (or dad) is homeschooling and working at home and attending to the other needs of the household. For each of you, it is beneficial to modify this definition to make it more specific to your own situation and needs. It’s also very beneficial to state why it’s important to find a solution to the defined problem. In this case we can say: Studies have shown that people who exercise regularly and nourish themselves well with nutritious food, are healthier, have more stamina, are more positive, vital and energetic. Parents who work at home and educate their children at home need as much energy as they can muster.

In addition, the latest studies about the brain show that there are optimum brain wave frequencies for creativity and efficiency. Those frequencies are difficult to maintain if one is tired, and stressed. Play(things that are done purely for enjoyment), exercise and down-time all contribute to creating a more optimum environment for the brain to function at it’s best. When that happens one’s productivity in business soars, one’s patience with children improves and one’s creativity with homeschooling ideas comes more easily.

We’ve now outlined the problem and the reason why a solutions is really important. Now we need to develop the solution. Spend the next few days developing your own problem statement on this topic, and the reason a solution is important for you and your family. Check back in a few days and we will begin the process of discovering how to make healthy changes.

If you’d like to receive emails or be notified on your homepage every time we add new information or a new post, please fill out the form below and hit submit. We have a strict privacy policy and will NEVER share your information with anyone.

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Welcome Everyone!! You are going to love this site. We will have information that will enhance your life as a homeschooling family and help improve your finances as well. We are a homeschooling family just like you. One of us currently works at home, running a few different businesses both on the internet and in person. One of us works outside of the home, but we are diligently moving towards our goal of getting him home too.

If you’d like to receive emails or be notified on your homepage every time we add new information or a new post, please fill out the form below and hit submit. We have a strict privacy policy and will NEVER share your information with anyone.