Once things settle down I will get back to the memes and back to focusing on our one year goal, until then though it is one day at a time.

This is my first time posting along with other blogs memes. I am going to tackle several memes a week and see how it goes. I hope to actually stick with my chores if I am writing about them.

Today’s first project is paperwork. You know, kids paperwork (papers and artwork), mail, notes, magazine and newspaper clippings… all those things that are too important to throw out but perhaps not important enough to file away with the *really* important papers.

Actually, we have had a paperwork nightmare around the house since we did the taxes. I have just been playing the out of sight out of mind game with all of it and stuffing things here and there. There are boxes and baskets on shelves, under end tables, just all over.

The deal is that since we have Court this week (long story) I have to get serious about getting the paperwork straightened up to insure I have all the documents I need for Thursday. I don’t think I will get it completely done tonight and I am not going to set that hard and fast a goal for myself, but I do plan on sorting it while I got through it looking for the documents I need and doing a serious purge of anything I just don’t have to have.

For all of those newspaper and magazine clippings I am going to start sticking them in binders. I have a few pretty (and a few not so pretty) binders that I can start using for organizing tips, decorating ideas, craft instructions, and recipes in.

My second project of the day is to complete several applications for part-time blog writers. There are several sites hiring writers and their topics are right up my alley. If I can get a paying writing gig it would help supplement my income to pay down debt and put cash into savings. I suppose that qualifies as paperwork as well, just without the physical paper . Wish me luck.

What are you planning on taking on today?

We started digging through the bank statements and through reciepts and we realized how much we spend of our paychecks just to enable us both to work. Doing some research I found that this is not uncommon at all. In the book, The Two Income Trap, the author, Amelia Tyagi, explains why the average two income family is falling into financial trouble. This interview with Amelia Tyagi at Mother Jones gives a lot of insight to the issue facing families today.

Still thinking we can’t possibly afford to lose one of our incomes, I found this article at MSN Money about how to thrive on one income and then used the calculator from the NY Times Home Finance Blog. What I found was shocking! After extra taxes (raising our income with two incomes put us into a higher tax bracket in effect, penalizing us), child care, expenses for me to commute the 330 miles a week (figured on the standard IRS guidelines), convenience foods, eating out, and a professional wardrobe for work, I went from the top earner of the family to netting only around $4000 a year.

Numbers are hard facts and a good reason to take pause. Is my family worth sacrificing for $4000 a year? Can I trim $4000 a year worth of expenses to make up for my lack of income? Can I find a way to suppliment my husband’s income by working part-time or from home?

This is our goal:

1. Trim expenses.
2. Pay off debt.
3. Save as much extra as possible for an emergency fund.

Hopefully by meeting those goals, I will be able to be at home full-time. Right now it is a one year goal. In the meantime I am looking for ways to speed it up either by starting a home business or supplimenting my current income to pay down the debt and save up a nest egg faster.

Either I give 110% to my job or to my family, but never both. A person can only do so much. When I am at work I am worrying about my kids and my home. I stress over my husband’s stressors, I stress over my kids academic progress, over where I will send them to daycare, to summer camp, on if I can find a baseball team that works with my schedule… it never ends.

I hate that I don’t have time to vacuum enough, to scrub the bathrooms as thoroughly as I want to, to keep up with the laundry, to organize the piles of paperwork scattered all over the house. I hate that I don’t have time to sew for my children, to garden the vegetables that would feed my family, to read to the kids, to teach the kids, to spend quality time with the kids.

My weekends and evenings are rush-rush. I have to cram in trips to the library, trips to the grocery stores, the hair cut places, the shoe stores, the clothing stores, the pet stores. I have to cram in time to make lists, pay bills, plan meals, do housework and laundry. If I take a day for downtime due to overwork, I feel guilty and frustrated that all the things I need to do aren’t getting done. I know that the next day or the next weekend I will have twice as much to do and even less time to spend with my family.

I am sick to death of telling my kids “later” and “not right now”. It is never a good time.

I am a wife and a mother. I should be at home doing those jobs. They are the most important jobs I will ever have. You only have ONE chance to raise your children and how can you do that when someone else (daycare) is raising them for you. There is a saying in the small business world, ‘no one cares about your business like you do’ and that is true for your children too, no one cares for your kids like you do. No one. The do their job and they may legitimately care for them, but they aren’t ultimately responsible for them and they are not raising them.

At some point in time women’s lib stopped freeing women and started enslaving them. Women felt that being a wife was oppressive. They decided taking care of their husband was demeaning and that children could do just as well in daycare programs as they could at home (if not better due to all the social interaction). Looking at the issues facing society today, I would say this has been a miserable failure.

• Women work as much, or more, than men and still are paid less. In broken homes they are not only paid less but are primarily responsible for the children, their education, their care, and their activities, and the only one responsible for their home. Child support does not compensate for the loss the children experience by losing a parent financially, physically, or emotionally.
• Half of marriages end in divorce. Everyone is so busy taking care of themselves, they don’t have time to take care of each other. Resentment and hatred from all of these frustrations are breaking up families every day. Spouses leave one another because they are unhappy and leave their children to single parent families and broken homes creating even more problems for the children.
• More children are diagnosed with mental illnesses and other issues like ADHD than ever before. Families are constantly multitasking and on the go juggling work and home life and using electronic entertainment to entertain children because their parents don’t have time to give them. These devices are in every room of the home as well as in the car and in the kids pockets.
• More children are obese than ever before. Fast foods and convenience meals make up more than 50% of an average families’ meals because moms are too busy and too much of a rush to cook a healthy meal. Kids spend more time inside than they used to. Between the electronic video games, television, and indoor daycare activities they are not getting the exercise they need for their growing bodies.
• The state of mind of both sexes has changed. Many men feel that women either want to work or that they should work and many mothers spend a large portion of their time feeling resentful and guilty that they are away from their children.

Those are just a few things.

However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. –Ephesians 5:33

This is not backwards thinking, this is a role in a partnership, in your marriage. Each member has a role and a women’s roll is no more demeaning than a position employed in a company outside of the home. As a wife and mother your duties are clear and your work is paid just as it is when you are employed outside of the home, because your husband works and pays the bills and provides for you and the children you have together. His role is also clearly defined. Everyone can’t fill the same roll or the home will fall apart when those duties are neglected, just as what would happen to a company if everyone wanted to be the CEO or the accountant. Not any one roll is more important than the other because neither the home nor the company can function without all of them.

My husband’s needs and wants are few and simple. He reminds me of this frequently and especially near his birthday, Father’s Day, and other gift giving holidays. He asks for nothing but respect and peace and quiet. He likes a hot meal and time to relax. By not pouncing on him and nagging him and constantly pestering him he returns the favor and works hard to give me the world. How can I refuse him those few simple desires? It is easy to slip into the “nagging, woe-is-me wife” but it is a constant challenge to honor my position as a loving and respectful wife. My husband is my knight in shining armor. After years of marriage he hasn’t changed, I have. I have to remember why I married him and love him again for those qualities that were good enough for me then, and really are still important for me now.

Why do I want to come home? Because it is where I belong.

I have been a working mom since 1996 when my second child was 3 months old. I went back to being a stay at home mom while pregnant with my fourth child then took her to work with me for the first 18 months while I breast fed her. I want to return home to be there to care for my children and my husband because the sacrifices are too great to be out in the working world to be worth it. The challenge is going from an in-debt two income familyto an out of debt one income family.

This is my blog about how I am trying to make that happen.