Healthy Work at Home Tips For Homeschooling Families

I’m assuming that most who read this blog are working from home. What type of business are you in? There are so many different options these days that allow you to work in your PJ’s and not commute. I met some people today who do software development for a newspaper in Boston, yet they live all over the country and move frequently to satisfy their need for adventure. There are those who do data processing at home. People run daycares or consult on the phone.

Regardless of what you do, most businesses need to be marketed. Someone, somewhere needs to know what you have to offer and then desire you product or services. The most common method of marketing is to sell people on your offering. But people hate to be sold and not many like to sell either. What if there was another way to connect and network? What if you could bring people into your sphere and get to know them and their needs first? Doesn’t this sound like more fun?

When I’m not wearing my clinical social worker hat, or my mom hat I work in network marketing. I don’t sell. I don’t accost every friend and family member with my product or opportunity. Instead I spend my time building relationships online and offline. Sometimes I can help people. Sometimes they help me. Occasionally someone wants to know about my company and I tell them. It’s easy and fun and puts me in touch with interesting people from all over the world. (I make money too, but it just happens naturally). I call it attraction marketing. The way that I network with people can be learned by watching a series of free videos. Click here if you’d like to watch them. I believe what you’ll learn can be valuable in any business that requires marketing and people skills.

What type of Business are YOU in? Please answer by sending a comment. Also include how you juggle your business and your homeschooling, if that pertains to you.

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If you’ve ever been to Europe you may have noticed that the European’s relationship with food is very different than ours is here in the US.  Here, food is often whatever we can throw in our mouths easily while also doing something else.  In other countries food is about nourishment of both the body and the soul. Meals are prepared, tables are set and people eat sitting down (at a table, not in the car).  The eating of food in old world cultures is about more than just calories, it’s about social connection and taking time to honor oneself and be thankful for the bounty on the table.

When you think about it that way, our quick dash through the drive-thru or the toaster tarts we eat standing up for breakfast, begin to appear rather obscene. In keeping with the theme of good nutrition for busy moms,  how do we keep all of our balls in the air and also change our relationship with food?  To begin I think we need to change our belief system. You are worthy of a sit-down lunch. Many months ago I wrote a post about taking care of yourself. One of the ways to do that is to honor yourself with a real meal and time to eat it.

It may be a meal by yourself while your kids are outside or working on their schooling, or it may be one where you all sit down together. People are becoming more interested again in creating time for family dinners, I’m also talking about breakfast and lunch. Think of the message you are giving your children if they see you making the effort to cook a nice meal for yourself and then sit down and eat it without doing anything else at the same time. Isn’t that the way you want them to treat themselves when they grow up? As I’ve written before, modeling a type of behavior is the best teacher.

So start small tomorrow. Decide which meal it will be. Pick a menu. Have the kids help you cook. Arrange your business appointments with a block of time set aside for a meal. Use glass dishes and put flowers on the table. Chew your food and savor the flavor. You’ll realize that the extra 1/2 hour you just spent gives more to your day and to your life, than it takes away.

Even with the best intentions it’s often hard to get all the nutrients that we need. Watch this blog for an upcoming post by a Master’s Degree level nutritionist. She is will be writing an article about how to choose healthy foods and cover all your nutritional bases. In the meantime, there is a vast amount of evidence that shows the necessity of at least 7 servings of high quality fruit per day. High quality means fruit that is grown organically or wild, and in non-depleted soil. The fact is that this is not the fruit we purchase at the grocery store. Our supermarket fruit has often sat in trucks and warehouses for weeks before ending up in our homes. It is often grown with large amounts of pesticides, in soil that has not had a chance to regenerate in many years. There is a product that I drink every  day that solves this problem. Just 2 ounces twice per day gives me the equivalent of 7 servings of wholesome/organic fruit in terms of antioxidants and phytonutrients. I really love this juice. If I skip it for a few days I can feel my energy level dropping. The product is called Monavie. Here is a link to read more about it. You can also purchase it directly from the company, on this website if you would like to try it. Click here to learn more.

OK, be honest here…how many of you eat the bread crusts your children leave behind and call it lunch? Or what about the half eaten apple, or the very bottom part of the banana? I have a friend who makes beautiful box meals for her kids when they are away from home for lunch but she is lucky if she remembers to throw some almonds in her pocket when she is running out the door. At least it’s almonds and not M & M’s!!

Let’s look at the difficulties involved with eating nutritiously as a busy mom. Personally, I’m not a food lover so if I am really busy, feeding myself is the first thing I “forget”. I also have a child who likes to eat constantly. I figure that if I nibble on her small left-overs, that should be enough to hold me until dinner. Thank goodness my husband likes to cook, and likes to eat meals as well. No corn flakes and milk for his dinner. So every night he cooks us a nice meal and we all sit down and eat together. Family time and nutrition in one easy package.

I do not feel I am alone in this manner of eating. When we have a ladies night out, we often share stories about nibbling on the lunch box remnants in the car on the way home. Are we really that self-sacrificing that we cannot take time to nourish our bodies? Work at home moms are especially prone to this problem since we are often don’t spend much time with other adults. If you work in an office, at lunch time most people eat. They either go out, or sit together and enjoy the meal they brought from home. Lunch at the office is both nourishing and social. Office people also take coffee breaks. Even though excess caffeine consumption can be a concern, these breaks are primarily about snacks and socializing.

At home most of us do not do this. We are so focused on our children, our home schooling (if we are doing that), our home business and all the other responsibilities of caring for a family that we often do not create a schedule that includes breaks for ourselves specifically designed for eating.

So what’s a mother to do? Stay tuned to the next few post and learn some nutrition basics, some time savers and some healthy eating tricks. By the time this nutrition series is done, hopefully we will all be taking better care of our bodies and our health.

I know there are some regular readers out there. If you like what you’ve been reading on this blog and would like to share it with people who may not spend time reading things on the computer, there is a solution. I have put an ebook on ebay which is basically a compilation of all the posts in the blog with some minor changes. It is called Notes From a Work At Home Mom. Who knows, maybe another mom or dad you know might appreciate it as a gift. (Just go to ebay and put “notes from a work at home mom” into the search bar).