As someone who has worked at home for the last 13 years I just have one thing to say. IT. IS. HARD. It is so hard to work at home when you have 3 kids. I was better at it when I had one child. Then I had 2 and was working at home. When the 3rd one came along I decided I needed to stop working at home and that’s when I went to teaching preschool. Teaching preschool is so much better than working at home with 2 small children under the age of 3. Now that they are getting older and will be going to school all day (all 3…a day I thought would never come) I will go back to looking for a job to do at home again.
I enjoyed teaching for Educate Online. However,it was hard to make 3 children be quiet from 3-8 during the week. I very seldom got any hours to do during the day while they were at school. I think during the 4 months I worked there I worked a total of 5 hours during the school day. It almost isn’t fair to them. Their after school activities had to stop too.
When you work at home you are constantly distracted. The kids want food, drinks, snacks, something to do, somewhere they need to go or they are just bored and want to talk to mom. Talking to mom is a good thing but not when you are trying to work. Most companies want you to put your children in daycare when you work at home. I’m sorry, but with the amount of money you pay me, that is just not feasible folks! You also never leave work. So your work is always there staring at you. Making you feel uncomfortable. Why is it looking at me? How do I make it stop? If you’re not careful you can find yourself working all kinds of extra hours that you wouldn’t be putting in if you had an outside the home job.
Working at home may be hard but it’s also rewarding. It’s great to be the one who’s here with my children. Only one of mine ended up going to day care and he only went for 2 years. I’m so thankful that I have been the one to care for them when they are sick, tired, hungry, silly or even just cranky! There are perks when we had all those school snow days in January I was able to work and bring in a paycheck while many just enjoyed days off without pay. I’m hoping with my blog I will eventually be able to just write from home and bring in some kind of extra income. My blog isn’t new but in the blog world it’s still a baby. It will take a lot of time and hard work to make this blog marketable. I’m up for the challenge. Bring it! It’s funny that my degree is in education because I think I’m better at marketing than I am teaching. One of my jobs at home was building a website from the ground up, marketing it, advertising it and doing everything else. I was accounts payable, accounts receivable, customer service, orderer of inventory, making the inventory available to the customers and so on and so on. Then I had to learn search engine optimization. That little website is doing great even today. I sold it during the time when I had 2 children under the age of 3. Working at home is both rewarding and difficult. Have you worked at home? What did you experience?
Here’s an article I cam across about the subject of working at home. Enjoy!
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I understand where you are coming from. Bless you with 3 of them. I take care of one of my grand daughters and I can't imagine having three of her daily. It is so hard for me to do anything with Abby, she is 3 and is active enough for 3 kids. When it's her bed time I'm too tired to get any work done. 2 more months and she starts day care and then I have a whole lot of catching up to do. She will not leave my side from the time she wakes up at 6 ish till she goes to bed at 8 ish.
I'm so thankful that they are all school age now! It will make working at home so much easier…well when they are in school. lol
Working from home is a challenge, that's for sure! I wasn't very good at it before (I had an ebay/website business a couple of years ago), but now that I'm "disabled", I'm going to try it again out of necessity. All of my kids are in school now, leaving me alone all day (except summer break). Maybe that will help!
There's a group on VoiceBoks I think you could really bring a lot of insight to, check it out if you have time. It's called Odd Job Mommas and the admin,Wendie, has a website to help moms figure out how to work from home. I was just thinking with your background and experience, you'd have a lot to offer!
I'll check that out! Thanks for letting me know. 🙂