10 Ways Stay-at-Home Moms and Dads Can Make Extra Money-Kiplinger

This article has some great ideas not just for us at-home parents, but for anyone who might be able to take a little more time to earn some side cash. Of course, number 10 is best way!! 🙂

Take a look and let me know if there’s anything you’ve done already or will give a try now.

10 Ways Stay-at-Home Moms and Dads Can Make Extra Money-Kiplinger.

Making A Rash Decision and Duct Tape Diapering

Guess we celebrated Avery’s recovery too soon. No more fever, but she started to develop a rash on her lower belly. It was good to see she was back to being active, but her eating was and still is not up to par.

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Despite what it looks like in the picture, Avery was not scratching at or even acknowledging her spreading rash. But, Going Mom did enough worrying for the both of them and was worriedly searching Dr. Google for an answer.

Since it was the weekend and the rash didn’t seem severe enough to act immediately, I said we should just wait until Monday and reassess then. My wife, still showing signs of concern, as any loving mother would, agreed to give it time. Meanwhile, she used several forms of home remedies/treatments in hopes the rash would suddenly disappear.

Coconut oil and her homemade solution of essential oils to diffuse may or may not of helped, but her rash was hardly visible by Monday. Phew! Kelley took off from work and neither of us wanted to spend her day off going to the doctor for our poor daughter’s rash. It had already been a long, stressful week for Avery, and an impromptu visit to the doc would only add to it!

In other news, Avery started undoing her cloth diaper again. This happened a few months ago and we used packaging tape as the solution. The tape sucked and fell off easily, so we’ve upgraded to duct tape which seems to work much better.

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So it’s come to this…..

Or so we thought…..

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Here, Mom, you might want this.

Apparently you have to duct tape all around or Avery will simply just pull the tape right off. Smart girl.  Now she gets duct tape full circle around her cloth diaper.

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Like any toddler, she doesn’t make it easy, but handing her the roll helps keep her still long enough just to make sure everything’s secure.

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Once she’s all wrapped up, she then likes to get down to rap.

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Okay, not really rap, but that’s the only thing that would work for my corny dad pun/joke. So sue me! Actually,please don’t. 🙂

Besides the mystery rash and finicky eating, we had a great family weekend together. Even though Avery didn’t have a fever, I think it was best we didn’t bring her to our friend’s kids’ 2 year old birthday party since she hasn’t been 100% quite yet and we didn’t know whether the rash would spread or not. Instead, we enjoyed playtime and coffee during the day, and a lot of The Walking Dead after Avery’s bedtime.

Seriously, we are hooked for the long haul and almost to season 4 at this point. It’s bad when we set a limit of 2 episodes and end up watching 2 more. The crazy life of parents with a toddler, huh? That said, I enjoy having a good show to get into with my wife, and it’s nice to stay off of the computer and watch something good with her instead.

Really quick before I wrap things up, I went on an hour long run in my new Soft Star Shoes Dash RunAmocs with a bullhide leather sole and find these better than my Moc3’s I reviewed previously. I’ll have a full review of the Dash RunAmocs eventually, but will be running a half-marathon in them on Mother’s Day before publishing anything. Until then, I’ll keep wearing my Soft Stars and Avery will wear hers as we exercise and play together each day!

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Has your kid ever had a mystery rash that didn’t seem to bother them but looked bad?

Any other kind of rash?

What do you think about taping your toddler’s diaper to keep them from undoing it?

17 Month Photo Session: No Go With The Bow

This is the second month we’ve had to push off Avery’s monthly photo session. Last month, my wife and I had a date night paint night (King Kong even made an appearance), and this month Avery was too ill for us to subject her to pictures in the chair.

Once our little girl was back in action and running wild, we knew it was time for her photo session. She’s still not eating right and it’s obvious her current teething is the culprit. Poor kid, can’t catch a break.

I have to hand it to her though, aside from her stubborn eating, she bounced back from her fever rather fast and won’t let anything slow her down. She made sure to make her photo session difficult just to prove that she’s not sick anymore and we can’t just take pictures as we please like I did the other day. Taking her away from the book she was “reading” probably didn’t help either….

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But that’s what parents do, right, we annoy the hell out of our kids. The first setup seemed promising and Avery put up a front as if she’d cooperate.

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But not a second later, she was lunging forward with her crazy face.

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It became obvious this session would be added to the another one of those categories, so we just managed with what we had. Basically, just a lot of re-positioning.

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The only time she held still was when she was pulling on the bow in her hair.

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Which, of course, led to it coming off.

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Kelley only had to put the bow back on, ohhhhhhh, eleventy-billion times.

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Which only made Avery increasingly interested in the little white thing clipped to her hair. Maybe it would be something good to eat?

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Nope, maybe handing it to Daddy would be better.

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Or maybe I’ll just hold on to it and give a quick pose.

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Guess that was all we got, because things went “downhill” from there….

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And hey, what’s with this bow always getting stuck on my head?!

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So that was our photo session for her 17 month mark. I know there’s a lot of changes occurring each day in our growing girl, but does that mean she’ll be better or worse for her 18 month session?

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I don’t know!