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Then, one day (while at my outside-of-the-home job) I stumbled across an ad on Craigslist that piqued my interest. A week later, I was signed on for training to edit a web site from home! I was thrilled, couldn't wait and immediately quit my job as a massage therapist at an upscale spa. This was the break I was waiting for, I could finally work completely from home!

Now, don't get me wrong, I do love it. It is great to just be able to sidle up to my laptop (at home or anywhere with wireless internet) and log on to do my work. However, I didn't anticipate the downsides being such, well, downers. First of all, the last thing you want to do when you are in your pj's on the couch with a cup of coffee is work. It's much harder to motivate yourself (and keep yourself from thinking about all the things that need to be done around the house) when you are sitting at home than when you are in an office where everything around you screams "WORK!" And believe it or not, your children REALLY don't care when the clock turns to the time you have to start working, and they still REALLY NEED some chocolate milk or decide they have to use the potty (which actually means sitting there talking and playing with the toilet paper). I think I need to have someone set up a hidden camera because I think I would get millions of hits on YouTube for the hilarity of watching me try to type while my 2-year-old daughter climbs all over me and my 8-year-old son is telling me an hour-long story about the Pokemon he has collected. "Mommy has to work" really doesn't mean jack to them. When Mommy is home, she belongs to the children.

Which brings me to my next point. I am not getting paid for doing two jobs at once, but essentially, that is what I am doing. Instead of being able to drop the kids off with someone else (so they can do my "Mommy" job for the day) and go to my paying job to devote all my energy and attention to the tasks there, I have to do both at once. Which means sometimes my day consists of going back and forth between changing pull-ups, making lunch, cleaning up spills, and changing the DVD, and working on the computer, checking e-mail, and logging my hours. Let me tell you, it's not easy.