Hi Jenners,
Another post from me! I am back to work this week. On my bike to work the first day, I kept having the feeling that I forgot the kids! I do like the intellectual stimulation I get from work, as well as the break from the kids. I loved being home with them for three weeks, but I think if I was home with them full time I would need to incorporate a little more time by myself. How do you manage that aspect as a stay at home mom?
One thing I really would like to try is creating a travel blog. There are good blog posts here about how this woman increased her audience to 100,000 page views per month and here about how to use find and use keywords. Having a blog would definitely be work, but I like that I could do it from anywhere, and I wouldn’t have to work on it full time. I do not need to make a full-time income from my blog, my goal would be to make about $1000 per month, which I think is totally do-able.
Murr and I have been obsessing slightly about the own and build vs. sell and rent question. Lately we like the idea of selling our current house and renting. We like the idea of not having to spend weekends doing house maintenance. Murray especially gets stressed out by all the little things to do with the house. So this week we are thinking that selling and renting may work best. I also like the idea that we could take off for a year and not have any expenses at home, which is still something I dream about doing. Although I also like the idea of the kids coming back to our same house, and we really love our neighbours, so I go back and forth about this question...
Anyway, that was a bit random!
love,
anne
What kind of travel blog do you dream of having? What would you focus on? In the whole credit card/points world I do feel like there aren't enough blogs that are focused on family travel and written by women. The first class flying single men just don't have the same perspective - not that I don't appreciate the blogs they just aren't focusing on things like how to find 4 seats together. I often have thought I should write up posts here (if I were writing to more of an audience) about which airports are good to transit with a family, which ones have family security lines, and things like that.
ReplyDeleteThe housing much be such a muddling trade off. I can really see the advantage of not owning (and additionally not being landlords) as far as the house maintenance. But there is something nice about being able to go away and then come back to something familiar. Have you considered the impact of storage at all? Not sure it is a big deal for you but if you are hoping to keep a lot of your things (rather than purge everything) storage can get expensive. Being able to rent out your own house partially furnished with maybe a room locked with your other things could cut out this cost. I read of one family (who went for a long time, 4 years I think) and they built a room into their garage and actually dry walled the outside before they rented their house. So you couldn't even access the things without taking down the wall!
Time to myself, well as mixed as I sometimes am about it...at the moment I basically have Netflix as a babysitter. We used to take the time on the weekend when my parents would take the girls. But now I just take some time everyday while they watch shows to do things online, make calls, use the washroom by myself...general luxuries ;)
I posted and then forgot to read the comments, until today! I agree that it is very difficult to find information about family travel, especially about how to book more than 2 tickets together. I had to piece a ton of stuff together when I booked our Australia tickets, and it took a long time. So one option is a frequent flyer blog from a Canadian, family perspective. The other option is more of a family blog about destinations and travelling with kids in general, without the miles/points focus. I could possibly do a combination, but the miles/points blog would probably have more of a Canadian focus, which may not attract as broad of an audience. One option is to have a general blog, but write miles/points posts as freelance articles for other blogs, or vice versa.
ReplyDeleteWe have decided to stay in our current house for at least two-three years, until M quits working. It would definitely be better financially for us to rent right now, but the whole idea of getting the house ready to sell, when we are both working full-time, is just too stressful. There is a possibility that someone would just buy the house to knock it down, in which case we wouldn’t need to do all those little things to prep the house for selling, but we’re not sure how to put those feelers out. We also LOVE our street and neighbours. We have a nice community here on our street, and that has a lot of non-monetary value. So we’ll stay put for now, and re-open the discussion in a couple of years.
Yeah, I tend to use the netflix/youtube/iPad babysitter for about an hour on days that I am home with the boys. I could see that creeping upwards if I was home full time and if M worked longer hours.