Do you ever wish you could pause everything happening around you so that you could get everything done in a day that you wanted to?

I wish I had a pause button, I’ll tell you that much.

On Wednesday night (one loooong week ago) an unwanted stomach virus made it’s way into our home through our eldest daughter. This normally would be a bad thing, of course it would, but this was bad timing at it’s very best…or worst. I’ve just started working hard with a personal trainer at 6:30 every morning, am still dealing with a toddler that won’t sleep through the night, have a home freshly listed on the real estate market which needed a deep spring cleaning for its first showing, had two Easter dinners (we had to skip out on) and…what am I forgetting?….oh yes. That thriving business I’m running!

The flu quickly spread to my husband and then our youngest daughter and it did not leave until yesterday. What a wild week! I have to say, I have no idea how parents who work outside of the home deal with these situations when they arise. I feel very lucky to be a freelancer at a time like this because my schedule is so flexible. However, I was totally thrown for a loop when all this started happening.

I’d planned to take a long weekend away from my work but having lost a significant amount of time thanks to the flu a couple days before my break, I lost a lot of ground.

I’ve read tons of articles and blog posts, books and whatnot about contingency planning and having a back up in place for when disaster strikes and I do have a plan. Sort of.

I know what to do if I lose my power, get sick or have a *eek* hard drive crash. But nowhere in my list of procedures do I have a plan for what to do when the arse goes right out from under my life for a week.

Luckily I have amazing clients and even though I had to miss a couple of deadlines they were understanding and nothing caught fire or anything because I was late.

There’s one thing that saved me, having to be away from my work for so many days at a time without planning to, and that’s the buffer I build into the time estimates I give for projects.

I used to be a “I’ll have it done for you on Friday” kind of person and I said that to everyone. But the problem was, I would literally have a dozen things to have done each Friday and by the time Thursday would come around I’d be going nuts trying to get caught up.

The thing is, it’s not smooth sailing in my life 24/7. When you’re a working parent, whether you work from home or outside in the “corporate world”, things are never going to go according to plan ALL the time.

I am so happy that I saw the light a few months back and started giving more reasonable time lines for project completion because…well…you just never know.

If you’re a service provider constantly overextending yourself, I hope you’ll be able to take something away from this.

Give yourself some breathing room – build in a buffer because sometimes life just gets in the way.

Keeping with the spring cleaning theme from Friday’s post…let’s talk about chores.

Because I am a work at home mom, and a busy one at that, I need help on the chore front. When everything gets piled up, I get overwhelmed and can’t focus on anything. If I have to keep walking past a basket of laundry begging to be folded or looking at a TV covered in sticky finger prints, I go a little nuts. “Why am I the only person who sees these things?” I ask myself. “Am I the only person around here who can hang up a frickin’ winter jacket?” I wonder.

The funny thing is, I’ve noticed when I ask my husband to fold some laundry or hang up a coat he just says “sure” and does it.

Hmmm.

For the past few months I’ve been *meaning* to create a schedule of chores to hang on the fridge so that each Mann in our house knows what chores he or she is responsible for. That’s work in itself so it hasn’t happened yet…not until today, I should say.

Enter: Chore Buster. The coolest website ever for dividing up chores. You register for a free account, enter the names of people who do chores in your house AND their email addresses so they can be emailed their chores daily or weekly.

Then you enter your chores. You can even pick which days of the week they’re to be done, how often, how hard the chore is and who should NOT do that particular chore.

When that’s all done you’re left with a handy sheet you can print off and hang on your fridge to keep you on track of who does what everyday.

I hope this makes the chore division around here a little more even and maybe even a little more fun. Until Mr. Mann starts reading my mind of course.

I chose to be a work at home mom, and I wouldn’t trade this gig for anything. But, boy oh boy, it can be challenging.

The good thing about being creative is that I find some pretty clever ways to buy myself quiet time from two busy little people under three apples tall.

I’d like to share a couple of my favorites because they might help you or a WAHM close to you:

• Busy crafts. Go through old magazines and cut out pictures that would interest your kids. My youngest loves to look at pictures of puppies, babies, women who resemble me (read: brunette women), and food that she can name. I cut those pictures out and then I give my oldest some construction paper, the cut out photos and a glue stick. She makes collages out of the photos her little sister likes, and it’s actually a project they can “collaborate” on for at least ten minutes. If the littlest one is napping, this can keep my preschooler happy for an hour or more.
• Messy fun. Sometimes you’re desperate. Your sitter can’t make it, you had an important call planned, you need fifteen minutes. This is when it’s important to tell yourself the mess doesn’t matter. I’ve been known to encourage allow my children to make as big a mess as they want if I could just have a few minutes to put some thoughts together. Picture this: a box of macaroni noodles,  waterproof markers, a glue stick, a newspaper, a toddler and a pre-schooler. Or, two mixing bowls, measuring cups and spoons, a box of grapenuts, some flour, a juicebox and the aforementioned children. You can pretty much use your imagination – figure out what your kids love doing but makes too big of a mess for you to do with them everyday. When you need them distracted, let them do that!
• Grown up play. If you have a filing cabinet and little ones, you know they can’t resist hanging files and papers. I have an old portable filing tote thing that I put old hanging files and folders in. When the girls are bored, I haul that out and give them some scrap paper. They love to play with something they think they shouldn’t be playing with so this goes over big. They can sit and pull out files, stuff papers in and take them out again. An extra fun thing for them is if I give them a sheet of blank address labels to decorate while they’re doing this. Then they can put “stickers” on folders and each other. It’s fun for them.
• Goop. This is an extremely messy craft and shouldn’t be done around carpet. In a bowl, mix approximately half a box of cornstarch with enough water to make it feel like clay – you don’t want it too powdery and you don’t want it too wet. Pick up the “goop” and squeeze it. It will be crumbly. When you let go or hold it loosely it will ooze out through your fingers. It’s solid one minute and liquid the next. Some people like to put food coloring in this, but that just makes it easier to stain stuff as far as I’m concerned. Depending on the age of your kids, this can be a science experiment or just a really fun thing to play with.

I have lots more tricks like this, but these should give you some ideas if you need some time to yourself today. (Of course, you could try doing what I did this morning and ship the kids off to Gram’s house.)

What about you? Do you have some brilliant ways of keeping preschoolers entertained that you’d like to share with the group? If so, please comment!

Anyone who regularly reads my blog knows I’m a huge fan of the Food Network and I absolutely love cooking. Unfortunately, my days are pretty busy now with a young family and a thriving business so I’m all for shortcuts whenever I can find them.

Since I’m pretty sure that if my husband were responsible for the cooking we would all die, I make 100% of our meals. And, I still like to prepare nutritious meals for my husband and daughters so I don’t like to have to rely too much on packaged foods.

That’s why I got pretty excited about this…

I got a ‘tweet’ through Twitter on the weekend which turned me on to a totally cool new Google thing called Cookin’ With Google. You type into the search bar the stuff you have in your fridge and in return you get a bunch of recipes based on what you have on hand.

Bookmark this site if you love to cook!

There are lots of recipe sites out there that allow you to search by ingredient but for those of us who are really lazy busy, this saves the steps involved with logging into the recipe site, finding the ingredient search, searching by course, blah blah blah. It’s instant. One step.

“When there aren’t enough hours in the day…” try Cookin’ With Google! 

My business has grown significantly since those early days in a separate area of the house and I know I could do a better job at organizing my office than I have been. I can organize anyone else, but when it comes to organizing myself, well, it’s kind of the same as the mechanic who always drives a jalopy. You’re too busy making a living doing what you’re good at to actually do the same for yourself.

I have found a few things that work for working from a home office with youngsters and I hope some of my readers will contribute their tips as well. Here are mine:

• I keep an office spike on my desk to stab receipts with, so they’re all there at the end of the month for me to organize.
• I have an old fashioned Hilroy scribbler for each client. I put all of their contact details, usernames and passwords and other frequently needed information on the inside cover. Anytime I speak with a client on the phone, I grab their notebook and keep all notes there in one place for them so I can retrieve details quickly.
• There is a Rubbermaid file tote thingy that I keep these scribblers and project details in that I can bring with me if I need to work from the kitchen, or when I had a dedicated office I could haul it with me when I needed to be mobile.
• I always keep some old cell phones, cameras, calculators and daytimers in a desk drawer to occupy the little ones since they always to play with things that they shouldn’t have.
• The beloved laptop. I am using the same notebook computer I did when I started my business two years ago. For Mann Made Time’s second birthday, which coincides with my “last-year-before-turning-30″ birthday next month, I’m purchasing a new machine. I think I’ll go with a desktop this time since my notebook will still allow me to work from anywhere in the house, which is key when you work from home with children.
• Make your space off limits! I often discover that my tape has gone missing, or my fancy stapler has disappeared. Where do pens go? Post-it notes get sucked into a black hole and it seems as soon as I buy them they are gone forever. I don’t think it’s the little ones either, I think it’s the other grown up I share my home with. When Mann Made Time moves its headquarters over the next couple of weeks, there will be some new rules in place. When the door is closed, nobody goes in, whether I’m there or not! I think I’ll be getting myself a sign to attach to the door with my office hours.

Anyone else have some tips? I’d love to hear them!

First of all, having two children under the age of three means that I simply can’t be tied to a desktop computer every day. I purchased a notebook computer when I started my business and it has served me well. Where my office is ’stationed’ isn’t necessarily where I get to steal some time to work, so having my computer portable is a must. I can take my work to wherever the children are playing.

It’s time for an upgrade, actually, and I’m thinking of going with a MAC next time…anyway…that’s neither here nor there!

My filing cabinet is nowhere that little fingers can reach it. It’s better that way. But I found it very inconvenient to have files stacking up on my desk and having to go to a different room when I needed something quickly.

I purchased a cheap black plastic file box that I can carry around with me. It has tons of letter-size hanging files and I have one set up for each of my clients, my own business and personal items. It makes it much easier to reach down into this tote for the files I need, rather than making a trip to another part of the house.

I’ve recently read about a new product in the February issue of ‘Entrepreneur’ magazine. It’s called CloudPrint, and it’s an HP product, in beta. CloudPrint downloads and installs a virtual printer driver to your computer. Then you can print from your word processing program or email it to CloudPrint to retrieve later. Sounds like a bit of a fancy PDF converter to me, but they have more sophisticated plans for CloudPrint in the future. Might be worth checking out.

I truly love being able to work from home. As I sit here in comfortable, casual clothes (no bathrobe even though it’s the holiday for it – I’d never get anything done!) watching the snow accumulate outside my living room window, watching my daughter play and listening to Etta James, it’s hard to imagine working a traditional 9-5 job again. If it weren’t for this huge pile of work staring at me and my 30 item to do list for today…this is almost relaxing