But one of the most important things that you need to do as a stay at home parent is have breaks from you kids.  Taking a break gives you the time to get rid of stress, “recharge” your patience, and appreciate your kids more.  I didn’t realize how important a break was to being a successful parent until recently.

In the past, I usually tried to get away from the kids for a day or two every two weeks or so.  For me, this was kind of the sweet spot and it allowed me to take a break before getting too worn down and frustrated with the kids.  But, it seemed that the timing wasn’t right over the past six weeks, and the usual opportunities that I normally would have had were taken away from me (thanks to being sick, and my wife’s business commitments).

Though I love my kids dearly, 42 days in a row with them was just a little too much.  These past few days, I found myself getting frustrated a lot easier and the little things got to me a lot more.  I think that even my wife noticed that I wasn’t doing so well and wasn’t “myself”.

But thankfully, I am sitting here writing this blog post sitting at my parents house with no kids in sight.  I am very thankful that they have the room for me and live reasonably close (an hour away), so that their home provides the perfect getaway without causing any kind of financial duress.

And how do I feel?

Great.  Relaxed.  And I am enjoying the quiet.  I know that coming to the city makes life a lot busier (since there are so many things to do), but it is a great way for me to recharge my batteries.  It has been long overdue.

This week, we have received calls from the same private and blocked number about eight times and they have wanted to speak to my wife every time.  “Unfortunately” she has been working, so tonight was the first time that she was home.

After they talked to her for a couple of minutes, the lady on the other end of the line wanted to talk to me.

Great.

When I picked up the phone she started rambling on how my wife had signed up for some contest on some site and we had won a trip to Universal Studios.  Being skeptical, my first question was:

“What site did she register on to enter the contest?”

Her response:

“It could have been any site…”

Wrong answer.  I asked her to take my name off the list and the call ended right there.

But at the same time, you find yourself with very few people to bounce ideas off of.  This can be problematic when you want to try something new – you have no one to talk to.

This just means that you need to use a little more trial and error, but in the end, you usually end up learning some valuable lessons.

An example of this is what I am doing right now – I am working on a plan to mass market a large number of blogs – 850 or so at the time of this writing.  Though most people would be intimidated by the task, these sort of challenges get me excited and remind me why I have decided the career path I have chosen.

So don’t be afraid to be different – where is the fun in being a sheep?

But procrastination will not get me or my family to the financial position that we need.  After my wife being let go last week from her job, the success of the business is even more important.  So it is time to “put up or shut up” and I better do what needs to be done instead of just farting around.

I have decided that an easy way to help me focus on work instead of just “farting around” is that I need a computer that is just solely for work.  This mean no Twitter, Skype, or checking stats (or email) five billion times per day.  This is a big time waster for me, and I can’t do that anymore.

So, I will be working by the clock, using a timer and working 50 minutes out of every hour.  During my break I am “allowed” to check my email and all that other “fun” stuff, but when I am working, that is all that I will be doing.

I will be reporting back in about a week to let you all know how it is going – I know that in the past when I lived my life by the timer I actually got a lot done, so I hope that it will work well this time too.

Anyway, enough of this blogging – I should get back to work before I need to go to bed (that is the new time management focused me talking   ).

Well, it has been over a year now, and finally, I have a lens that has made it into the top 100.  It has taken  a lot of marketing, but it is nice to finally see that it has made some ground.

But, I am concerned that it isn’t going to stay there for long – though it gets some good traffic, it needs more people to comment on it.

So, if you have a chance, could you visit my lens on proxy websites and comment and rate it – I would appreciate it very much

• Well, the babysitting job that I started I managed to only last a month.  The kids I was babysitting were brats and were ganging up on my daughter, so that was the end of that.  You should always remember to put your family first before work – and it was a great example to learn from.
• Had a scare this past week with my wife.  She had chest pains and had to be rushed to the hospital.  Thankfully, it was only Costochondritis, and nothing serious, but scares like this are never fun.
• We have been fighting with our new bank and losing money in NSF charges at our old one due to a huge mess caused by transferring banks out to the town that is closer to where we live.  Didn’t help that the person that setup the transfer of our funds messed up and it has been nothing but a headache.
• Another new look for the site was added today as I decided that the old one kind of sucked.  Okay, it really sucked, and I hope that you all like this one better – tell me what you think in the comment section.

Otherwise, that is about it.  Have plenty of work that needs to be done, and I get to spend the weekend with just me and the kids as the wife has gone to the city to take a break – can’t wait until it is my turn

Anyway, this week is starting something new for us.  You see, a couple of weeks ago, a lady here in town called to ask if I would be able to watch her kids during the week while she is at work.  Since I work at home anyway, and my girls are here with me, I accepted because I didn’t mind to help.

So, today is the first day, and the first half hour has passed.  After a few shy moments, the three year old that I am watching has warmed up, and Courtney and her are watching Wonder Pets.

We’ll see how much work I can get done with more kids under my wing – I’ll write back later to let you all know how the day goes.

Wish me luck!

You see, we just bought a house here back in September of 2008, so this town is new to us.  Our home that we lived in before in Saskatoon was being moved to make way for new commercial buildings, so we were left with the choice of either finding a place in Saskatoon (where rental was going to be our only option as the housing market was overpriced), or buy a house somewhere else.  Since I worked at home, all I needed was a community that had high speed Internet – which most places in Saskatchewan have.

After a lot of house hunting, we ended up buying this house in Conquest.  It was a big change as I grew up in  the city and I was really worried that living in a small town wouldn’t work for me.  We moved from a city of about 300,000 people to a town of about 170 – big difference!

But what I didn’t realize was that it would grow on me.  Honestly, I was at the point in my life where I was getting tired of the rush of the city and I just needed to slow down my life – so in the end, I think it was a good choice.

There is just something magical about waking up to a beautiful sight each morning, going to sleep in the dark (unlike the city where it is always bright), and living in a place that is quiet (something I still can’t get over, though I really don’t miss the constant noise from the city).  I also love that the people are friendly out here and take the time to talk to you – something you will never see in the city.

I hope you all have a great day, wherever you are in the world, and I hope to see you back at my blog tomorrow – thanks for reading

Specifically, I have been working on blog commenting which does take a little time.  I am making the point to read the blog posts so that I can make a constructive comment.  I have been reading a lot today, and have learned quite a bit, but there is one thing that I have really noticed:

Most people are not blogging constantly.

I admit that I am in that boat too, but there are a lot of people that haven’t even made one blog post this year – which is unacceptable.  Not only does this mean that they will see a reduction in traffic, but what makes it worse is that their sites could totally go stagnate and lose all their search engine rankings.

After learning my mistake last year with my main site, I have been making an effort to at least blog once per month, but hopefully I will be able to do more than that – I guess time will tell.

So, today, I will be installing a new theme, doing a little customizing and making this site look pretty – I think it is about time.  Hopefully, I can come up with something good – just take a look at it later today.

UPDATE on January 25: Well, it took longer than expected to get a new theme up, but I am in the process of tweaking the new theme for the site. I think it does look a little better, and though it does need some work, I think it will work out fine.

Hopefully the tweaking won’t take too long – I am trying out a new tool to make it work.