Blisstree » dad-stays-home

Water Heater Kicks the Bucket

gayla — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 16:14:42 +0000

So what’s worse than being stuck at home in a 4 day record breaking rain storm with 5 kids under the age 7 during April Vacation?

Answer: Being stuck at home in a 4 day record breaking rain storm with 5 kids under the age 7 during April Vacation, and then having no hot water…

It has been abnormally cold and then all this hard driving rain is driving me nuts. I was chilly and a nice hot bath was in order. Unfortunately, the hot water heater kicked the bucket on us. I didn’t know it but was ready to strip down and hop in a nice steamy tub when my fingers touched nothing but a steady stream of icy cold water coming from the faucet.

Darn it all!!

Looks like tomorrow morning first thing we will have somebody out to the house to take a look. Once that puppy is fixed the kids are getting tossed into the tub for the entire morning and I will be in it all that evening…

Post from: Blisstree

Water Heater Kicks the Bucket

December 2006 Top Referrers

gayla — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 18:18:59 +0000

I wanted to share with everybody what the top 10 websites who have referred people to Inside Fatherhood are. I will post at the end of each month who the top 10 referrers are for each month. Here they are in order. The first one had the highest amount of people referred from their site.

1) Dad Stays Home Forum
2) Bloglines.com
3) b5media
4) Pro Blogger
5) Pimp Your Work
6) Digg
7) Play Library
A Hearty Life
9) Silly Dad
10) Googababy

Post from: Blisstree

December 2006 Top Referrers

So How Did I Become a Stay at Home Dad?

gayla — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 12:24:14 +0000

Let me explain in further detail how I became a stay at home father. There were many aspects in my married life prior to having kids that indicated it was bound to happen, and the real question was more of when. When my wife and I first met she had most of her life figured out. She knew she was off to Veterinary School in Ohio and that she would spend her 4 years there and return home to go to work with her dad who owned his owned Veterinary Hospital. We also knew we wanted a lot of kids. I also knew I was not set up yet with a real good career job and was bouncing around working here and working there as we moved and traveled.

So if you put all those together it was almost inevitable, unless we wanted to put the kids in daycare. Not that my wife and I are completely against the idea, but we would rather have one person at home with the kids.

So for us there were 2 major determining factors in this:

1) My wife was making 5 times the amount of money I was. With her working there were tons of benefits from it, including the weekly paycheck.

2) We wanted our kids to have one parent raising the little ones during the day. Statistics show good results with at least one parent at home than throwing them in daycare for the day. Again, I am not opposed to daycare facilities. For some families both parents need to work and I am happy there are opportunities for the parents to use daycare facilities. But for us it doesn’t seem to be an option. Why?

Well, currently the daycare cost in my area is running anywhere between $350 and $500 per week per child. I have (or will have in January) 5 kids. Even if we chose the cheapest route we would have to fork out $1750 for the week. If I paid the higher prices I would be forking out $2500 for a week. I have 2 kids in Elementary School so I wouldn’t have to pay for 2 kids during the school year and only during school vacation and summers. So let’s get a rough estimate using the cheapest possible scenario.

3 children in daycare for 52 weeks at $350 per child would total $54,600 for the year. Let’s say I needed to dump my 2 older kids in daycare for 2 months in the summer and 2 weeks for vacation time like Christmas break, etc. So let’s go with 10 weeks for the year. So for 2 kids for 10 weeks at $350 per child would run us $7,000 for the year. That’s not too bad but let’s add that number to the $54,600 we originally came up with for the 3 kids and we would be forking out $61,600 for an entire year of daycare.

So basically if I had a job that paid me $61,000 per year it would cover all my expenses. With me at home we are actually saving money. To be honest with you, I don’t think I would end up paying $350. I think realistically it would be anywhere between $400 and $500 so the $61,000 is a bear minimum figure.

So now you know a little bit about why I decided to stay home. A lot of it is financial reasoning.

Post from: Blisstree

So How Did I Become a Stay at Home Dad?