A Work at Home Mom’s Blog

As I mentioned last week, I sold the domain to my other blog. If you were also a reader of that one, you can now find it at kristypruitt.com/momspinchingpenniesagain. I’m not sure whether I’ll be updating it any more, but all of my past articles are there for posterity.

Anyway, there will be lots of nail biting going on here until I get the payment for that. We’re a bit behind on the bills, and I was counting on that money to get caught up. But we’ll just have to hang in there until it gets here. That’s all we can do. At least we’re not facing foreclosure or repossession or cutoffs or anything like that.

I just hope we end up getting a little something back on our taxes. I have everything I need to do them, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I guess I’m subconsciously putting it off, because I know that if we do get anything back, it won’t be much due to our financial situation last year. And worse, we might even end up owing the state some money. But I do need to get that done and over with so we know what’s going on.

Oh, I almost forgot. A lady over at Career Overview emailed me last month to let me know that this blog was featured on their list of 60 Truly Inspiring Blogs for Stay-at-Home Moms. About my blog, they said “Kristy’s personal blog is honest about the challenges of balancing parenting and working at home.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. It’s not all sunshine and happiness, and sometimes it can be downright difficult. But the rewards are many, and if I ever do go back to working outside the home, it will be because I have no other choice. But anyway, do check out that list. I plan to when I have the time.

When Pumpkin was sick, she asked if she could sleep on the couch. I let her, because it put her closer to the bathroom in case she needed to make a run for it. But now she wants to sleep on the couch all the time. She says she can’t sleep in her room.

I let her sleep there the night that Hubby and I were sick, because I didn’t feel like arguing about it. But I put my foot down the next night. And the following day, I asked her what was bothering her in her room that kept her from sleeping.

At first she said she didn’t know. I started naming some things that might have bothered me as a kid, like noises, lighting, temperature and such. She said it was none of those. Then she mentioned that her bed wasn’t very comfortable.

That’s not the first time I’ve heard that. She’s said it before, and I’ve found out for myself the few times I’ve lay down or slept in it. It has an old hand-me-down mattress and box springs that have seen their better days. And while I’d love to run right out and buy her a nice, comfortable orthopedic mattress, I can’t do that right now.

So she’s just going to have to get over it for now. It’s not bad enough to cause her to wake up in pain or anything. And when she sleeps on the couch, she doesn’t really do much sleeping either, because she wants to watch TV. I plan on getting her a better mattress as soon as possible, but just like Hubby and me, she’s going to have to learn to live with the bed she has for the time being.

The past week has been so full of ups and downs, I feel like I’ve been riding a roller coaster. I’ve even had the nausea to prove it.

It all started Sunday night, when Pumpkin got up vomiting. She was out of school for two days with a horrid stomach bug. I had planned to get lots of work and work hunting done, but that didn’t happen since I was waiting on her hand and foot and barely getting out of her sight. Taking care of her is the most important thing to me, no question. But I really needed to try and make some money, because Hubby was supposed to be losing his only source of income.

In the meantime, I got an offer to buy the domain name of my other blog. I named a price, based on the average of what several of those website value estimators said, and heard nothing back for a few days. I assumed that the prospective buyer wasn’t interested in paying much for it and mourned the loss of that extra income.

The night before Pumpkin went back to school, I found out that I had the virus that she had just gotten over. That morning, Hubby woke up with it, too. We were completely useless that day, and yet again I got no work done. Most people would have just grabbed their laptop backpacks and camped out in bed or on the couch, and gotten at least a thing or two done. But no laptop here, therefore no can work if I can’t drag myself to my computer desk.

I heard back from the prospective buyer, and was offered a much lower price for the domain name. After a lot of thinking and weighing the pros and cons of selling, I decided that I would take a lower price, but not quite that low. So I made a counteroffer that I thought we could both agree to. And it worked. The buyer’s agent set up the transaction, payment was sent to them, and I followed the instructions to initiate the transfer.

Then I found out that it would be twenty days until I would receive my money. The domain registrar has it, but they don’t send it until twenty days after the agreement is made. So there went my plans to get the mortgage and some other bills up to date.

The next day, Hubby got a piece of mail. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it looks like his money will now be coming in for a few months longer. That will be helpful. But had I known that, I don’t know if I would have taken the price I did for my domain.

Somewhere along the way, I got an email from one of my contacts informing me that he had received a virus email sent from my email address. I had suspected that something was wrong with my computer for a while, because it was running slower and doing a couple of other strange things. But my usual virus and malware scans had turned up nothing. I spent an entire day working through the steps outlined at Major Geeks in an attempt to eradicate it. It seems to have paid off, because I have seen no further signs of possible infection. But there was yet another day when I got no paying work or job hunting done.

Speaking of which, I still haven’t had a bit of luck finding any projects or ongoing gigs. I picked out some articles from Demand Studios to do, but writing them is slow going since I haven’t written for them in so long. And a lot of their titles turn out to be impossible to write after some research, so that’s pretty hit or miss. Maybe when the proceeds from my domain sale come in I’ll feel comfortable enough to work on some of my own projects. Until then, I’ll keep looking for work from others.

So that’s my roller-coaster week in a nutshell. I really hope next week is much less eventful. Or at least eventful only in good ways.