There have been times in the past when I was left disappointed on Mother’s Day. It could have been because I thought we were going to do one thing or another and didn’t, I had to run around to all the other “mother’s” houses in my life, or I still found myself doing things around the house on my special day.

Making your Mother’s Day special this year is easy. I’m going to give you just a few tips that will help you make your Mother’s Day count this year.

Let’s be reminded of who we are expecting to make our Mother’s Day perfect for us… our kids and our husbands. You can see where problems could arise right?

Let’s take a look at a few things that you can do upfront to make sure that your Mother’s Day is a relaxing, special day:

• Plan To Do Nothing – I don’t mean you should plan to not partake in any celebration of Mother’s Day. I’m mean that you should go into Mother’s Day with nothing looming over your head that needs to be done. No laundry, no dishes, no picking up, no food shopping. Make sure that you do whatever it takes on Saturday to take care of all of your Sunday duties.
• A Little Direction Goes A Long Way – Maybe your husband has great intentions about what he would like to do for you on this Mother’s Day but he either doesn’t know how to pull it off OR what he has in mind wouldn’t be what you would consider as a Mother’s Day celebration activity. You can certainly give suggestions and hints prior to Mother’s Day that would allow him to plan for something that YOU would enjoy doing. A little direction does go a long way with these fellas.
• Get Rid Of Your Expectations – Today’s expectations turn into tomorrow’s resentments. Get rid of any expectations you have about how your Mother’s Day should go because you’ll only end up disappointed.
• Take Full Advantage Of Mother’s Day – Like I said, we only get one day for us per year… take full advantage of that. Make sure to schedule some alone time into your Mother’s Day. This could be an hour doing yoga or maybe you go get a facial. Also… Let people do things for you. I know that a lot of times it’s hard to sit back and let people do the things that you normally do around the house but for just one day give up the control and allow yourself to be taken care of.

Another situation might present itself that can be kind of troublesome. What if you have both a mother and a mother-in-law in the area. It’s Mother’s Day for them too. How do you give them the recognition that they deserve on this day without forgetting about yourself?

I usually see if we can take them out to dinner the day before. That way we are still taking them out and celebrating Mother’s Day with a nice dinner but we’re not running around like crazy people on Sunday.

I would also arrange to have something delivered to their home on the morning of Mother’s Day just to keep them feeling special.

Have a happy Mother’s Day this year. You deserve nothing less.

It’s not always easy for a stay at home mom to realize that she’s losing her self esteem until it’s too late. Forget that! Here are some ways that a stay at home mom can maintain her self esteem and keep herself motivated to do the very important jobs of raising a family and running a household.

Realize The Importance Of Being A Stay At Home Mom

Let me just start out by giving you a few facts about the job of a stay at home mom that you should file away in your brain:

• Stay at home moms work in excess of 90 hours per week
• If actually earning a salary the average stay at home mom’s salary would be well over $120,000.00 per year
• The average stay at home mom holds the following positions: housekeeper, daycare teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, facilities manager, janitor, van driver, psychologist, chief executive officer, and nurse.

There is a really great application over at salary.com called Mom’s Salary Wizard which allows a stay at home mom (or her family) figure out exactly what her salary would be for all of the hours she puts in per year.

The Mom’s Salary Wizard allows you to choose your area of the country, personalize your exact job duties and it also allows you to create a “paycheck” that is made out to the stay at home mom. It’s fun to do for yourself and it’s a great way for a family to show their stay at home mom that they appreciate what she does.

Once you really take a look at everything at stay at home mom does and what it would be worth in the real job market, you should never again in your life be ashamed or embarrassed to tell someone that you are a stay at home mom. It’s one of the most important roles a person can take on.

Stay At Home Mom’s Need To Keep Themselves Looking Presentable

I bring up this point from experience. As someone that made the transition from being a 40+ hour a week working mother who had to look presentable and business casual every Monday through Friday to a stay at home mother who wasn’t guaranteed to leave the house every day…my appearance took a nose dive.

I got into a stay at home mom rut. If I wasn’t going outside the house…why bother changing out of my PJ’s? I’ll tell you why. Getting dressed in the morning really sets the tone for the entire day.

If you are putting around in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt all day you can’t expect to feel like you’re on your A-game. Slowly but surely your choice of bed attire during the day will have a negative impact on your self esteem without you even realizing it. You should not work in your pajamas.

Here are some stay at home mom rules to live by:

• Make your bed every morning
• Relax in your jammies while enjoying your breakfast (eat breakfast everyday!)
• Immediately after breakfast, head into the bathroom to get ready for the day
• Do whatever you need to do as far as cleaning your body
• Get dressed, including your shoes (you can’t believe the difference having shoes on makes on your attitude…you’re ready for anything when you have your shoes on)
• Style your hair. Whatever that means to you. Make your hair look good enough so that if you had to go out and sit in a restaurant or something you wouldn’t be self conscious about it
• Put on a little makeup. I know, it sounds like a housewife from the 50’s or something telling you to put on a little lipstick when you’re feeling blue. But seriously…if you would wear makeup to leave the house, you should be wearing makeup daily in your home. You don’t have to apply it like you’re headed out for a Saturday night date or anything. Just a little dab ‘ll do ya.

Believe me, I understand that a stay at home mom’s life can be hectic and she can’t always take all the time that she would like to work on her appearance. That is fine. Most days I don’t take a shower until night time when my husband is home. In the morning I just “freshen up” and then get ready for the day. We’re talking 15 minutes here.

You will almost immediately experience a positive effect from taking the time each morning to get ready for the day. You self esteem will improve because you don’t look like a pile of mess walking around the house and you’ll just feel more confident overall.

Stay At Home Moms Need To Be Their Own Motivators

Out of the three areas of possible self esteem lowering scenarios that a stay at home mom needs to overcome, motivation is by far the most difficult to deal with.

Remember the days when you worked for a company that not only had specific job requirements that they expected you to adhere to, but they also continually gave you feedback on how poorly or how well you performed those job requirements.

On top of that verbal or written feedback, you also got some called a raise in pay from time to time that worked pretty good as a motivational tool for yourself.

Now? Bubkis. Stay at home moms will eventually learn that they need to create their own motivation or else they are surely to sink. There is nothing worse in life than to wake up in the morning realizing that you have no motivation to perform any of the tasks that you should be performing for the day.

Different people use different things as motivational tools so there is no way for me to tell a stay at home mom exactly what she needs to be doing to motivate herself. You have to figure that out on your own.

What I can do is offer up some suggestions:

• Try making a detailed list each day of what needs to be accomplished. It sounds so basic but some people are really motivated by being able to see on paper what they have accomplished and be able to check off their accomplishments for the day.
• Create an informational newsletter for your household. I know, this sounds crazy. Hear me out. I live in a household where there are a lot of adults. It’s pretty hard with everyone’s different work schedules to all be on the same page. I have created a monthly newsletter that goes out which talks about special household projects I am starting, what these people can do to help out, and what I have planned for the upcoming month. This newsletter gives me a sense of accountability and structure that without, I drown. My family gets a kick out of my writing, I get to hold myself accountable by actually putting a plan in place that is known to other people so that if I don’t perform the duties…people will know, and it gives me time each month to think about our household processes and what improvements need to be made.
• Treat yourself for good work. We talked about the lack of job feedback and raises and the negative impact that can have on your motivation. Implement your own reward system. For me, I choose one day a week to do something really relaxing during my lunchtime. Maybe it’s watching a recorded show that I love, or looking around on the web at things I’m interested in (non stay at home mom related). Something that makes you feel good and that you are going to look forward to.

So there you have it. If you stay on top of the three key areas that effect a stay at home mom’s self esteem you will reap the benefits. If you have any other ideas on how a stay at home mom can maintain their self esteem please feel free to comment.

What happens when you begin to slowly realize the horror that your niche is over saturated? Welcome to the plight of the stay at home mom niche.

What to do? Do you throw in the towel for your current niche and move on? Do you just move forward with what you had planned hoping that you can somehow rise to the top of your niche market? OR…do you try to use your over saturated niche market as an advantage?

There is power in numbers people! Make that fact work for your over saturated niche.

It had occurred to me that since I am both a work at home mom and a stay at home mom, the two things that I would like to blog about most are both part of an over saturated niche.

Sure, it crossed my mind to just give up on the stay at home mom niche and try to find some other topic that I was as passionate about. It turns out, there is no other niche that I would have enough passion towards to be able to continually create quality content.

Making The Numbers Work For You

In a time when more than just quality content on a site is needed in order to gain good rankings in search engines, it is important to get yourself out there and get some links on sites that have topics relevant to what your niche is.

I guess this is where you could make your over saturated market work in your favor. Along with writing excellent, bookmark worthy content for your site you need to get your name out there. You need to gain some recognition from the other people in your over saturated niche.

Because I am a work at home content creator of course I’m going to tell you that content is king, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t realize the importance of using techniques like social media to increase your audience.

If you utilize social media sites in an attempt to get people to follow what you are doing, it would make sense that it will be people in your niche that are going to be interested in what you have to say.

Moving forward my goals are going to be to start participating more in some social media networks and as always produce relevant, quality content for my readers that deals with both the stay at home mom niche and the work at home mom niche.

Let’s see if I can pull it off.

But was it always this way? Did I come out of the gate loving my role as a stay at home mom? If it weren’t for my position as a stay at home mom would I have ever taken on the role of web content creator? Hmmmm.

If you really break down the roles of both the stay at home mom and the stay at home web content creator you actually can see how one compliments the other.

What? You don’t want to go through the hassle of breaking down the important qualities of each? Well, that’s what I’m here for. All you have to do is keep reading.

Discipline

Stay At Home Mom – When you take on the roll of stay at home mom you essentially become the person that runs the household. Your job doesn’t just consist of entertaining your child throughout the day. No, no, no…get that right out of your head.

Discipline is the key to making it in this business. Think of it, you don’t have someone monitoring what you are getting done in a day. You don’t have someone giving you heat because you’re falling behind your schedule.

On the other side of the coin, you don’t have someone giving you constant constructive feedback about your performance. You don’t get reviews or raises to let you know that you are doing a good job. The only thing you have is your discipline baby!

Being a disciplined stay at home mom is what gets you through those days when you just don’t want to do anything and you know that there is no one else there to tell you to do it anyway.

Content Creator – You may have a deadline…but that’s it. Usually a content creator is left to their own accord. They are responsible for making sure that they put in the needed time which will ensure them meeting their deadline.

Ultimately you are your own boss. No one is going to tell you to stop reading your favorite blog and get writing. It is your own discipline or lack there of that will make or break you in this business. Believe that.

Achieving Discipline In Both Areas – Let me be the first to say that if you are not a disciplined person…you CAN become one. I’m living proof of that. If you were to have seen my stay at home schedule mom daily schedule even one year ago compared to what it is now, you wouldn’t think you were looking at the same person.

Finding discipline in one area of your life can have a profound effect on all other areas. Start with one thing. Take one piece of what you do and become very disciplined with it. This could be doing a load of laundry per day, making sure your sink is empty each night, or sitting down to write a blog post every single day.

Once you have that one area on a disciplined schedule…add another thing and then another thing and then another. Before you know it you have disciplined every aspect of your life and you will be able to stay on track no matter what area of your life you are working on.

Communication

Stay At Home Mom – What good would it be if you were to come up with these disciplined processes in your home if you cannot effectively communicate it to the other members of your household? Well, it would be no good and it would leave you doing a lot of extra work and becoming burnt out and disgruntled. We all know what happens when people become disgruntled…not pretty.

To avoid a disgruntled postal worker scenario a stay at home mom needs to learn how to best communicate to her family members how and why a process is in place. She also needs to communicate to them their roles in this process and how their lack of participation in this process will effect it as a whole.

If you think this sounds crazy then you should read my monthly newsletters that are printed out and hand delivered to my family members…that’s no joke. By communicating to everyone in the home exactly how and why things are going to run a certain way you providing structure and…that’s right, discipline to your home.

Content Creator – Well, this almost goes without saying but a good content creator needs to posses excellent written communication skills. What is the main reason for that? You want people to get the gist of what you are writing. Simply put, you need for your ideas to easily come across in your writing.

Another reason that a content creator needs good communication skills is so that they can always be on the same page with their client. Our job is communication, it’s not the job of all the clients you will be working for and so we need to take on the role as the communicator.

It is up to the content creator to make sure that they know exactly what the client is looking for in terms of their content. It’s also up to the content creator to make sure that each party understands what the other is responsible for. You don’t want any surprises when it comes time for payment.

Being An Effective Communicator In Both Roles- More than likely if you are a content creator, you are going to find that it is your written communication skills that are the strongest of all your communication skills. Take advantage of that fact.

Put everything in writing. I know it sounds a little odd to be writing out processes for your family to follow but it is effective. You’re going to be able to give them a step by step guide to follow about how you want things done and you are also providing them with something to refer back to so they can’t use the excuse “I forgot how”.

The same goes for your role as content creator. A lot of times you may be dealing with people who don’t have a true understanding about what is involved in creating content. Let them know. Explain in writing your processes that you follow, what is expected from them, etc.

Everyone will be better off because of your effective communication skills.

Patience

This topic doesn’t need to be split into the different roles that you have because having overall patience is what will make you successful in any area of your life.

There are going to be days that no matter how disciplined you are and how well you are communicating with others…you’re not going to get to all of the things that you need to.

There are going to be days that every time you begin what you are trying to do the phone rings, someone calls out mom, the doorbell dongs, the pet needs to be let out, the school bus pulls up, someone fell and scraped their knee, someone is running a fever, someone needs a ride somewhere, or someone just needs a little TLC.

On those days the only thing you can rely on is your patience. It’s what’s going to get you through.