Yes! You read that right. Two simple kitchen items that are significantly easy on your pocket book as well as excellent cleaners for a host of items around your home. But, what about MORE than general cleaning? You want to do some deep cleaning for the spring season.
The truth of the matter is, you CAN use these simple products to deep clean your home. They do a spectacular job, and you will be pleasantly pleased on the money you will save by not having to buy all those harsh-fumed expensive cleaners.
Baking Soda
Baking soda is much better, less abrasive, and much more effective as well at cleaning some of the most stubborn dirt, stains and grime than you might think. Listed below are just a few of the items that baking soda can get sparkling clean and work wonders with.
1. Baking soda can clean your silverware, making it streak free and super shiny.
2. Baking soda will become your new best friend when it comes to wiping down and cleaning countertops.
3. Kill stubborn carpet stains with baking soda. Sprinkle baking soda liberally over stains, then pour a little white distilled vinegar over top. Let set for a few minutes, then scrub thoroughly.
4. Kitchen sink will remain odor free just by pouring a box of baking soda down the drain once a month.
5. Did you know that baking soda will work wonders when washing your pots and pans? With white porcelain, boil 5 tablespoons baking soda and water for 10 minutes. They will magically look like new! Also non stick frying pans will come clean by boiling them with a combination of 5 tablespoons baking soda and 1 cup water.
6. Keep your brass door knobs shiny clean with a mixture of a little baking soda and warm water to make a paste.
Vinegar
White distilled vinegar has been a household cleaning item for generations. It is excellent for some major spring cleaning.
1. I think everyone knows that windows come streak-free clean with vinegar. Use half vinegar and half water and then wipe them down with paper towels or newspaper. Newspaper actually works the best.
2. To eliminate odors from various rooms in your house, place a bowl of white distilled vinegar in each room overnight. It works like a charm!
3. 1 cup vinegar per 1 gallon of water is excellent for no-shine floors.
4. To keep ants at bay in the spring, spray white distilled vinegar around windows and door entrances, and also anywhere else you may see ants.
5 You know that strong onion smell on your hands after chopping? Get rid of it fast by wiping your hands with vinegar.
6. A mixture of vinegar and salt will brighten up your china, especially those stubborn tea or coffee stains.
There you have it, open your windows to let some fresh air in and kick your spring cleaning into high gear with these 2 simple inexpensive, most used household items.

Article Written By Tammy Embrich

Tammy has been successful in the work at home industry for many years. She is an Internet Marketer, Article Marketer, and Ghostwriter. She offers free job leads for the job seeker, as well as other work at home resources, work at home articles, tips, and more at Work At Home .

Tammy is also a passionate blogger. You can find more articles by Tammy at her Grandparenting Articles and Tips blog, offering grandmother’s experiences, grandparenting articles, parenting articles, brags, recipes, tips, photos, and more.

Our economy is troubling right now. Many people are losing their jobs, taking pay cuts, or losing hours so that businesses can continue to keep their doors open. The economic problems are affecting everyone, not just the people that are losing their jobs or taking pay cuts.

If you are a work at home mom or a stay at home mom, this can cause stress in your life. If your spouse has lost his job or taken a cut in pay or hours, you may be feeling the stress of knowing that you may have to go get a job to help make ends meet. I know this is something that you don’t want to do, so this article will show you some steps you can take to make sure you don’t have to get a job outside the home.

• Store

One way to save money at the store is to buy only the items that are essential. Don’t buy that awesome shirt that you just know would look great on you, don’t buy that must have pair of earrings to go with that new dress that you purchased, and don’t buy your husband that cool hat that would be an awesome addition to his hat collection. These are luxuries not necessities and so if it came right down to it, these could go by the way side.

Another way to save money at the store is to consider buying in bulk. If you have a Sam’s Club or Costco, you should consider buying your meats, chicken, and canned goods there instead of the grocery store. You will save money in the long run because these items can either be frozen or left on the shelf for several months.

One last option to consider at the store is to purchase generic items when possible. If you think about it, can you really taste the difference between name brand and generic French fries or soup? There may be certain items like cheese or lunch meat that you will want to purchase a name brand rather than generic, but if you can consider generic as much as you can.

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New Year’s Day is tomorrow and I’m very excited for it to get here. That’s not to say 2011 wasn’t a good year, because it most certainly was, but I’m looking forward to what 2012 has to offer.

Tonight I will spend the evening with my family and we always have a great time. We party until all hours of the morning, but we won’t be doing that this year. Chris has to be to work at 7 am on New Year’s Day so we’ll leave shortly after midnight, but the party will still be good.

I hope you celebrate New Year’s in your own way and have a great time doing it. I look forward to what 2012 has to offer and I pray that each and every one of you is safe tonight and have a great time.

Here’s to a great night and a wonderful year!

The holidays are here and I can’t believe we’re winding down 2011. It almost seems unreal. When the holiday strikes like Christmas, what happens to your home business? Some people continue to work through the holidays; I semi-unplug and I use this time to re-focus, re-energize and pre-plan for the New Year.

Whether you plan to work through or work part-time or completely unplug, be sure to prepare for what may lie ahead for your home business.

Website
Since many people prefer to shop online, make sure your website is easy to navigate. Be sure you have the correct contact information including email and phone number or another way to get in touch with you. Check for broken links on your website. It can be extremely frustrating if your website is cluttered and it’s hard to find things. You lose sales when people can’t find what they are looking for.

Keep your product details and descriptions clear. This way it will eliminate the need for customers to contact you for more information. Keep your catalog and inventory updated.

If you have business hours and customer support hours available, make sure it’s listed on your website. Be sure you or someone is available during those hours to assist with customers’ inquiries.

Don’t forget to state your shipping deadlines or additional fees.

Most important if you have your own website and not a company’s website, make sure you have the most recent backups especially when you add or delete pages on your site.

Home Office
Before you take off to enjoy the holidays, there are five things you should do before closing shop.

1. Tie up loose ends such as finish up your clients’ work, submit invoices for payment, pre-schedule blog posts and so forth.

2. Set up your home office system like autoresponders and voicemail.

3. Clean up your office clutter and file all documents in its proper folders. Check your emails and clear your inbox. Check your business calendar and make sure everything has been done.

4. Plan for next year by making goals. You can do this in your downtime. Instead of waiting until January 1st to roll around and then trying to get back into the swing of things, take some time to reflect and re-organize your priorities. Off the bat, what would you like to accomplish in the first month? Then plan for realistic and reachable goals.

5. One last important thing to remember is to take time for you. A successful home business is a happy home business owner. When you feel good about yourself, it reflects in everything you do and the choices you make in your life and in your home business.

Sophia McIntyre is an Internet Marketer, Article Marketer, Ghostwriter and founder of WorkAtHomeSpace.com, a free resource focusing on work at home jobs and home businesses, money making opportunities and other work at home related topics.

Do you work with work at home moms? If they’re your main audience, you’ll want to bookmark this post now so you’ve always got something easy and helpful to tweet.

10 Quotes to Share:

“For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.” Lily Tomlin

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Eleanor Roosevelt

“If you neglect to recharge a battery, it dies.” Oprah Winfrey

“I work with wonderful people who support me… the business needs to serve the family rather than the family serve the business.” K Ireland

“When people go to work, they shouldn’t have to leave their hearts at home.” Betty Bender

“The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” Vidal Sassoon

“It’s not what you do once in a while, it’s what you do day in and day out that makes the difference.” Jenny Craig

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.” Eleanor Roosevelt

“Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” ~Judy Garland

“I am not afraid…I was born to do this.” ~Joan of Arc

10 Tips to Tweet:

Always remember why you chose to work from home. Keep priorities in order and everything else will fit around it. #workathometip

Kids love to “play” office. Give them their own space with office supplies and let them “work” while you do. #workathometip

Create an inspirational working area for yourself. #workathometip

Night owl? Morning person? Know your natural rhythm and base your schedule on it. #workathometip

Track your time. Know your biggest time wasters and look out! #workathometip

Learn what motivates you and build that into your schedule/plans. #workathometip

Don’t forget to take breaks to stretch, hydrate, and care for yourself. #workathometip

Working from home doesn’t mean you’ve got to stay home. Get out in the sunshine and network! #workathometip

Find another work at home mom to buddy up with–you can encourage and keep each other on track. #workathometip

A “do not disturb” sign and a pair of headphones can work wonders for reducing distractions during your office hours. #workathometip

I work from home. I also homeschool three little inquiring minds. I’d never tell you it’s easy. But it’s the right choice for our family and we make it work.

How can you make time, and find the energy, to run a business from home when you’re also homeschooling?

Be Sure You Know Your “Why”

If you’re juggling both homeschooling and working at home, the #1 piece of advice I would offer is to know why you’re doing each. Be 100% convinced of your decisions.

There are rough days but if you know you’re doing what’s best for your children by homeschooling, and what’s best for you/your clients/your mission in the world through your business, the question isn’t, “Should I give up?” but instead, “How can I make this work better?”

It’s that certainty that will drive you to get it all done. You’ll find the time and energy to push through the challenges and succeed.

Plan Smart, Be Flexible

Have a daily plan. Scheduling to the minute doesn’t work for me, but I do schedule general blocks of time for each duty. I know generally when I’ll be focused on teaching and when I’ll be focused on business.

Never do three times what you can skip doing completely. If you’ve ever tried planning out your own school curriculum, you know it’s extremely time consuming and can make your head spin to match books to guidelines and cover everything. I have three kids. I’d have to go through that process for each of them. I don’t do it. Instead I choose curriculums that come with the plan ready to go. I take those plans and lay them out in my homeschool daily plannner as I look over each week (I use “The Well-Planned Day” and wouldn’t survive without it). I know exactly what’s required each day to complete our school year on time. It’s worth the money to know my plan is solid and I can focus my time on their learning instead of my planning. Explore your options. There are many curriculums that come with planners ready to go.

Look for areas where planning can save you time. For example, plan your meals and shop monthly. Try freezer cooking and learn to use a crockpot. You’ll save hours of “what’s for dinner?” and last minute trips to the grocery store.

Be willing to be flexible and forgiving with yourself. You’ll have to bend a bit on the days where your kids need more support or when you have a business emergency.

Guard & Leverage Your Time

Learn how to guard your time. Don’t spend hours chatting on the phone, or watching TV. We all need some down time to relax, but if you’re watching a couple hours of TV nightly, you shouldn’t be wondering where your time went…

“When people say to me: “How do you do so many things?” I often answer them, without meaning to be cruel: “How do you do so little?” It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don’t. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever.” ~Philip Adams

Keep your priorities in mind when you’re deciding what to do. Make it a point to learn how to do things better and faster.

Look for places in your homeschooling and your business where you leverage your time to spend it on the most critical tasks and outsource, automate, or delegate the rest.

Get Support

Don’t try to do it all alone. That’s a recipe for quick burnout.

Ask for help. Involve your family and share the duties of housekeeping and meal time.

Get support in whatever form you need. Maybe it’s a charter school. Maybe it’s a mastermind group or business coach. Maybe it’s involving your kiddos in group classes, or having your spouse or another mom share teaching or kid care duties.

Want more? Click here to Visit Michelle’s “Juggling it All” page for free ecourses on crockpot and freezer cooking, menu planning tips, and more.

In this day and age, we all lead very busy lives. As a mother and a wife, my typical day starts with breakfast, getting the kids ready for school, then it’s off to work only to return home 8 hours later completely exhausted. Who has time to clean?

When the weekend finally rolls around, I have just enough time and energy to do just my basic cleaning. After the weekend is all said and done, most of what I wanted to accomplish, didn’t get done. As I sit and ponder this maddening cycle of cleaning and re-cleaning my home, I realized that there has got to be a better way of getting everything done!

I decided to come up with a new game plan and this time, it involves everyone in my family pitching in and helping, after all, I am not the only one who lives here! I sat down and drafted up a list of all household chores that needed to be done on a weekly basis and decided who would best be suited to accomplishing that task. Once my list was made, I conducted a family meeting and informed everyone of the new changes. I did meet some resistance, but eventually, they all came around.

After the family meeting was done, I headed off to our local discount store to purchase some new supplies. In addition to those supplies, I picked up some plastic bins, one for each member of the family. Once I arrived home, I labeled each bin with one family member’s name and filled their bin with the supplies they would need to accomplish their assigned tasks. In addition, I wrote up a checklist of all household chores that the particular family member was responsible for and taped that to the outside of the bin. Now…there was no confusion on who was responsible for doing what!

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In high school and college, I never really envisioned my life with children. I’m sure lots and lots of young women can easily picture themselves pushing strollers and warming up bottles, but those images never even crossed my mind. I was going to be a career woman. Possibly a magazine writer or television writer, where the only thing I would be warming up was my third cup of coffee in order to meet my latest deadline.

So imagine my surprise, when at age 30, I had two school-age children, both with special needs, who were now not only my kids, but my students. What twists and turns life can take! The first few years of homeschool were so overwhelming I couldn’t even begin to imagine adding a work load on top of my other responsibilities. But over time, my boys and I got into a nice groove, and I began to crave that stimulation that job and career can bring. It took more time than I hoped to pin down a stay-at-home position, but eventually it did come, and I have been a WAHM and homeschooling mom ever since.

This journey has left me bruised and battered, but oh so much wiser, and if I can help other mom’s find the balance between work and homeschool, then my adventure will be all the sweeter for it. Here are my five top tips for moms who work at home and homeschool their children.

1. It’s all in the curriculum. You can be a mom who creates all your own curriculum OR you can be a work-at-home mom, but you simply cannot do both. Finding a curriculum that lets your children work at least somewhat independently is crucial to finding balance. Computer based curriculums are good for independent work, especially if you have enough computers in your home that each child can work at his or her own computer. Our family uses the Time4Learning homeschool curriculum (www.time4learning.com) because all of the lesson planning, testing, and record-keeping are done for you on the computer. It also has the benefit of being multimedia and interactive, so my kids really enjoy their learning, and aren’t constantly grumbling about their schoolwork. Using an online curriculum can free up large amounts of time that you would normally have to spend in preparing for and overseeing homeschool lessons. If an online curriculum is not an option, spend some time investigating other types of curricula that are comprehensively designed, and don’t need as much hands-on attention.

2. Get with the program. And by program, I mean the schedule. I happen to love schedules, and don’t have any sort of bristles that stand up on my neck when I use one, but if you are a happy-go-lucky, non-scheduled sort of gal, it is time to repent. You simply won’t be able to make the working/homeschooling thing work without setting out your day into some sort of timetable. Fortunately, there are some great free tools to help you make the transition from ad hoc to planned out. A written or electronic day planner is a must. I use a free widget that sits on my desktop and reminds me at a glance what I need to get done each day. It even gives me the option of checking off those things I have completed, which is a real inspiration-booster. For homeschool scheduling, you might want to try a free tool called Homeschool Skedtrack (www.homeschoolskedtrack.com) which lets you schedule and track each child’s progress through every subject. And if you only work best under a deadline, you might just enjoy Hassle Me (www.hassleme.co.uk), which allows you to set up reminder emails which will “hassle” you at random times throughout the day until you get something finished!!

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