money, money, money. It makes the world go round. It buys shoes. It fills my spam folder with hundreds and thousands of offers- get rich now, make thousands every day, increase your attractiveness to the opposite sex. Personally, I think I'm attractive enough to the opposite sex. At least I'm not getting any complaints.

How tempting is it to fall into the money trap these days. Instant credit is out there, personal bankruptcies are multiplying at every new pay period. All those check and cash advance stores at the local minimall. It's hard to keep up. It's also very tempting. Instant gratification. A concept that comes easy to my generation. I know people whose parents never taught them the hard and fast way of living solely within their means. Those people are skating disaster. Even me, I fell into the trap when I got out on my own. Easier to order out than to live on ramen and spam at home. Easier to go to the movies to escape poverty than to sit around thinking up cheap ways to entertain myself. And now I'm a housewife without any sort of big paycheck. What can I do to feel productive? How do I make myself feel that I'm contributing in a meaningful way when this society seems only to value our productivity as it relates to the bottom line of the tax return?

So I'm doing the melaleuca, and that has a small return in hard cash every month. It would be more if I could enroll more people (hint, hint) and those people in turn could help enhance their bottom line. Trading stores, that's all it is. Get your household supplies and such through them instead of target or walmart- it's cheaper, works better, and is not chock full of poisons for my family and myself. I also run ads on my blog, and Adbrite actually does pay me every month unlike the Adsense program which drops a large random portion of it's participants without a viable system or actual proof of misdoing. And then there's the online craft store, Etsy. That is a help too; it's led me to several small commissions.

In the end it all comes back to money. I want money to make our lives easier. I want to be able to have everything I've ever dreamed of, I want to be a two income family on one paycheck. That's not an easy goal. I'll settle for living a decent lifestyle on the one income; it means I can enjoy my daughter while she's young and still thinks I'm all-powerful. It means that I can enjoy a life that a lot of other mothers would love to have. I'm not coming down on working moms by saying this because I truly believe that we're all working moms. If I had a wonderful career I wouldn't hesitate to put the Toddler into a good daycare program and go back to work tomorrow. But this is what my husband and I wanted for me to do, this is what we're happy doing, and more power to us for making it work. In the end all anyone can do is to find something that works for them and go with it.