Monday, September 10, 2007

Staying at home

I think one of the best things you can do is to be a stay at home parent. I know this isn't possible for everyone, but I think it should be. It angers me that it is so hard to make a decent living while staying at home with your kids. You need to fill out surveys for $.40 cents a piece and then get a million ads in your inbox. Or you need to invest all kinds of money and have it maybe not work out.
Society knows it's a great thing to be able to stay home with your children, yet it's almost impossible. I sell Avon. I have been doing this for almost a year, and maybe I'm doing it wrong, but the money just isn't there. I heard all these testimonials about how women made 1 million dollars selling Avon, and I'm thinking, "where do you live?" I'm no idiot, and I just can't seem to catch a break. I have searched all over the web for good paying jobs I can do while staying home to take care of my family and I haven't found anything without a catch.
I guess this blog is more a rant then anything. I know if I was writing blogs about celebrities not wearing underwear, I would be on t.v, in magazines and being interviewed by Oprah. So what's up, has taking care of your family really taken a backseat to whether or not Brittany Spears will get custody of her kids?? Who cares?
I guess America does.

1 comment:

Melanie Verlatti said...

Hey B,

I totally know what you mean. As a young mom and a college graduate I totally feel you. Society does tell us that being a stay at home mom is the hardest job out there but however there aren't a lot of jobs out there for women who want to spend more time with their kids than working. I found myself thinking about this a lot after my daughter Mia turned 1.
My husband was making enough money to support our family but I wanted to go shopping and a lot of the stuff I wanted to buy he didn't want me to have because he felt it was too costly.
I started to rack my brain to try to think of ways to make some extra money and be able to have my daughter with me at the same time.... I thought of babysitting. I did that all through college for local moms and made a ton of $$ but now that I had my own daughter to tend to babysitting was not an option for me, or something I really had the energy for. I ended up thinking of an idea that I would carpool for kids going to school or extra curricular activities, or elderly people who needed rides to doctors appointments, grocery shopping etc... This idea started in September of 2006 and here I am one year later going full swing. I drive kids to school in the morning in Blackhawk, and pick up from school, take to soccer practice, doctors apptmts. etc. They live 10 minutes from me so its not a big commute and the 2 families I carpool for live within blocks of each other. I can have Mia with me, wear my sweats, and have my day basically free to do whatever I please, but I still have my own play $$. And word travels fast so what you do for one family soon travels to many more. What started as just a simple thing I did once or twice a week has began to flourish into a business of sorts and a profitable one. So don't feel like there is nothing you can do being a stay at home mom. Where there is a will there is a way. Try to think of something that you can do that other people need, and will pay good money for. You may be surprised at what you come up with. ~Melanie~