Ok, so I believe the famous last words went something like 'I'll be back sooner then last time'. Uhum, well, managed to embarrass myself there didn't I!
Much later.....but we have managed to get the little English rose into creche for three full days and two half days per week. I have started gym again and am enjoying it. The Herbal Life shake I take every morning is really working for me (noooot another Herbal Life die hard I hear you say).
I visited my parents in Spain for Christmas. It was great for a holiday but noticed the restaurants along the beach promenade seemed to be taking a little strain fighting for customers. Lots of properties for sale.
At some point last year I signed up to do a 'communication work course' in 2009 with the University of Bergen but decided to withdraw. I really wanted to do it but we have so many ideas and plans for the year that will take up all of my time when they start happening.
Today I saw a translation position available at the South African Embassy in Oslo and was just itching to apply for it but it's the wrong time for me. They were really looking for a qualified translator (which I'm not yet) so maybe I'm not quite what they are looking for but it sounded interesting. Any other takers? It's on finn.no. if you are interested.
I am besotted with my little English rose at the moment. Although she is all time consuming and demanding - she is also just pure joy and happiness.
Hubby's birthday is coming up next month. I tried to get tickets for the BIC Riverdance but they were nearly fully booked. There were a few tickets left in not so nice places and they cost more than a weekend in Paris so I decided to scrap that idea. I think sushi in Southampton will have to do.
Tomorrow I'm off to visit a South African friend who is due to have her baby in two weeks time. I have been diligently packing our little English rose's old stuff away in the garage for the occasion.
I'm slowly getting where I want to be - not quite as quickly as I had anticipated but - slowly does it.....
Isn't it amazing how fast time goes?! In the back of my mind I have been thinking to myself that I must blog down my 'master plan' and changes in life but there never seems to been much time to keep several blogs updated.
A lot has happened since January and I have a couple of ideas for my own business (on the net) but they are still in the infant stages so I'm not going to share details at this stage. It involves Norwegian/English translation but I am weighing up the pro's and con's.
When I started this blog I had this idea about working from home and spending time with my children. Well, I'm going to try and put this as gently as possible - I must have had rocks in my head!
As mentioned I am working on some business ideas but quite honestly - I need to get out and meet people! So in the light of my 'emotional change' I have considered many more options. But they do still revolve around the children because I'm not quite ready to let go yet.
Another option that I am considering is English teaching. But I am trying to find out what I need to do to get a Norwegian English teacher's qualification as well as a British one. Working as a teacher would allow me a schedule which would accommodate the children. I have been spending some time at my youngest son's school and I quite enjoy the primary school.
Unfortunately I did a BA in psychology and History in South Africa so I would definitely have to take on a few subjects to make up for teaching subjects.
So with all these plans whirling around in my head and an 18 month old daughter who is only at creche 2 half days pr week (working on that one). - my grand master plan is not developing as fast as I would like it to.
It's seems the little princess is awake. I will be back...sometime sooner than last time.
Boy oh boy! Are things getting hectic in this household, I had forgotten how fast a baby can crawl! You know that independence idea I had and all that talk about taking more time for myself and getting a tan and working on that sixpack stomach? Nowhere near it!
Hubby has finally decided to do that seminar run in South Africa and the response has been overwhelming. The initial 350 seats were sold out within the first 24 hours so he has another 200 people to accommodate. The man is working 24/7, he worked through the night last night and now he has just passed out in the bedroom. But there’s enough limelight on him – this is my space – my corner!!!
I decided to take some steps to ensure my route to independence so I have found somebody to assist me with cleaning the house once a week for a couple of hours. Today is Friday and the cleaners have just left, the house is clean and I have two hours before the boys come home from school. That means two hours to ‘play’ and discover new things in cyber world-what a luxury!
And I found a brilliant babysitter down the road who will be looking after the kids (all 3 of them) one night pr week so that hubby and I can romance. This is a quite a big step for me with the little one being 10 months old. We had a trial run last week and everything went perfectly fine and my little one loves her new ‘friend’. I did consider installing hidden cameras but decided against it. Our little princess is worshiped and adored by her older brothers so there are watchful eyes on her all the time.
My friend from Norway will be spending the week with me next week so I have written the week off for socializing and entertainment. She is one of my most precious friends so I can’t express how excited I am.
I haven’t had much time to play in cyber world this week but I did learn something interesting today from Bloggernoob about private ad sales. People actually trade ads to make it look as if their blog is earning lots of money and that way they can sell their money blog for more – fascinating!
My daughter is trying to pull the Sony TV screen off the stand – this would be the same TV that her brother drew a cave man on a few months ago. What happened to good old fashioned glass TV screens – they were so easy to clean. Ahhh the good old days…..
So I’ve been jumping around cyber space lately (that’s in between dealing with a teething baby and family emergencies). I am overwhelmed with the stuff that I am learning from bloggers all over the world, there’s just so much information out there!
What started out as a little project to keep friends and Business Warriors updated on the progress of our move has turned into something completely different. It never occurred to me that strangers would want to read my diary but apparently they do. I feel as if I have crossed the threshold into a completely different world and there are all these friendly strangers who want to teach me stuff and tell me about their life experiences – it’s just amazing!
I started reading RennyBA's Terella because I wanted to teach my husband about Norwegian culture but instead Renny has introduced me to technorati and Blogcatalog and other blog things that I never worried to check out before. There’s just so much to learn and so little time!
During the first year of Migration Diary I didn’t even think about monitoring traffic or joining blogging communities but then one day hubby decided that he wanted to see how many people were reading my blog so he enabled Google Analytics (this was a couple of months ago). Once I realized that quite a few people were reading my blog I became quite fascinated with the whole ‘traffic’ thing so I started looking at other blogs to see what other bloggers where doing.
Now I’m jumping around technorati, MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog meeting other bloggers and having a wail of a time learning all kinds of new stuff. I was a little disappointed in Amatomu.com though. They were monitoring my traffic quite nicely for one week and I made it to number 138 or something on their list but then I had a few hundred clicks last Tuesday(due to Petesweekly) and all of a sudden they cut me off. Now I can’t read my page impressions or user sessions on their chart anymore and I’m plunging to the depths of the Amatomu blogging chart!
Hubby said it’s because they probably think that I cheated or something when they saw the numbers jump so high within a few hours. Ah well, my claim to fame – I got ditched by Amatomu. I’m still getting linklove though, I’m not sure how that works but I’ll try to learn all about that this weekend.
Time to put baby down for a little snooze, the journey will have to continue later.
I was thinking about AdSense this morning when my mother phoned. With panic in her voice she informed me that my youngest son had managed to lock himself in the kitchen and now they couldn’t unlock the door. It took me five minutes to get there, I managed to crawl through the kitchen window but after two hours we had still not managed to open the door. Hubby gave it another try with his famous tool box but he was just as unsuccessful. Eventually we gave up and I went hunting for Chinese take away for gran as she was starving. Unfortunately nothing was open with the exception of Tesco express and I managed to grab the last sandwich on the shelf.
Back to AdSense, I searched through the forum to find out what other people thought about AdSense and weigh up the pros and cons. At first it seemed so simple but then according to some people it wasn’t that simple. I understand that if you have a site which has it’s main focus on making money from ‘clicks’ or advertising then it would work well but that’s not exactly what I have. Hell, I don’t even know what I have yet!
I went searching for my guru (my husband) and asked him to give me one simple reason why I wouldn’t want to use AdSense on my blog. I already knew why I should use it but now I wanted to know why I shouldn’t. The answer was quite simply;- because I don’t want to redirect traffic away from my blog. I want to have affiliate links on my blog so that I can earn $49 dollars pr click instead of a few cents. Now that just makes so much sense to me! Quality not quantity - that works for me!
So now I have decided to search through clickbank and find some really good ebooks that I believe will add value to somebody’s life.
Lately I am suffering from what can best be described as ‘creative discontent’, It’s sort of like getting all dressed up with no were to go (although I must emphasize that my party days are long gone).
I have these thoughts and ideas in my head and they pop up at the most inconvenient of times like when I’m feeding baby or digging through a wet load of washing in the washing machine to find that Estee Lauder lipstick which I like so much (yes, that did actually happen today), in other words when I don’t have time to write them down. Time is something that I don’t have much off in any case - unless I make a concerted effort to take some for myself. That is what I have decided to do because how else will I ever find the time to regain my independence if I can’t take some time to formulate my thoughts and ideas.
Fortunately hubby has the whole house connected with wireless so I can carry my laptop around the house with me in an attempt to utilize every spare minute that I can get. Did I mention that I adore the man? He is just the absolute best! In her sleep our little English rose can hear a mosquito fart from a mile away so I usually sit with her when she is having her afternoon snooze (too scared to move), laptop in one hand and baby in the other.
I was on the Business Warrior forum when I came across Indigo Jane’s post about thoughts and making something out of them (thank heavens I’m not the only one with this feeling) so I had a look at her blog - 'Millionaire mum'. I had heard about Wordpress but never found the time to actually try it out but Indigo Jane inspired me – I just had to check out Wordpress! I got completely lost in ‘my weblog’ and a little agitated when hubby came to ask me what was for dinner but first things first – a man has to eat.
Wordpress is absolutely brilliant and really easy to use although I find blogger.com easier. Wordpress really gives a ‘professional’ look and allows for more creativity, I’m still playing around with it but have decided to stick to blogspot.com because I am more familiar.
Blogs have become so popular and user friendly that I wonder why people even bother with websites anymore. Create a nice looking blog with some affiliates links and voila – you have an online business! If only it was that easy.....
When my second son started school I felt as if I was free to pursue a career again, I was so motivated and ready that I was chomping at the bit. And then the wonderful news that I was pregnant with a baby girl arrived. It was a surprise and the idea did take a little getting used to but I had always wanted a little girl so it didn't take me long to get (very) excited and start shopping for little pink babygrows. I'm not a youngster anymore and my body did take strain with a third pregnancy but our little angel is here now and we are all happier for it. Whatever plans I had it would just have to wait, in my mind this was much more important.
Yesterday for the first time I spent five hours away from my eight month old little angel, it was a strange feeling. I missed her so much and found myself thinking of her sweet smile as I was running around doing Christmas errands but on the other hand I reveled in the excitement of being busy and productive. My two older children needed me to participate in various activities with them so it was a busy morning. In the car on the way home 'Miss Independent' by Kelly Clarkson was playing and I couldn't help but reflect on the words of the song. What happened to Miss independent.....she went in a new direction ... she fell in love.
I love being at home with my children but I'm not really one for housework - entertainment is more my kind of thing so my children are never bored - I love to play. But housework is an essential part of daily life and so it has to be done. There are times when I feel that I exist only to serve other people and look at these 'supermums' with three kids and full time careers with envy - how do they do it? How do they manage to fit everything in and still keep everybody around them happy? Do they sleep at all? Are they for real or just something that the media has made up to make the rest of us think that this is the way we should be.
I had a conversation with a friend about being a working mum and how hard it can be. We discussed the complexities of juggling children, cleaning house and earning a living (all at once). We both agreed on how hard it was to choose between spending time with our children and financial independence, there just didn't seam to be enough hours in the day to achieve both. We had both realized that the only way we could possibly have everything we wanted would be to have an internet business and work from home. But where to start?
I am fortunate because my husband is an internet marketing genius and he works from home. When I first met him I didn't even know how to switch on a pc never mind have a discussion about whether I prefer Mac or Windows (I much prefer Mac by the way). He has taught me everything I know and I am still learning something new every day whether I like it or not! I have never really used the knowledge that I have acquired although I could, there has never been a need for me to step out of my comfort zone. Why should I when I am happily married and everything is ambling along just fine? I'm glad you asked - because I miss my independence. I have been raising children for the past ten years and I have another few years to go because my youngest is only eight months old. It has been so long since I felt that I was capable of being financially independent or that I could manage to look after my children if something had to happen to my husband. But the thought is there every day - when I have time to think.
I meet mums everyday who talk about how emotionally torn they feel because they want to spend as much time with their children as possible but they also need to earn an income. I feel that every mother should be able to run an online business from home. Why should we chose between our children and financial independence! We shouldn't!
