It could be me.....!

I'm really enjoying being a Stay-At-Home-Mum at the moment. It's a fantastic thing to witness your baby's day-to-day development, and, although I really believed that by now I would be climbing the walls begging to go back to work and desperate for "sensible" adult conversation, I find myself entering into another chorus of "Baa-Baa Black Sheep" (Archie's current favourite) with unceasing vim and gusto. I love our bouts of raspberry-blowing, playing hide-and-seek with dummies and muslins and fights for ultimate control of the telephone.

In fact, being just over 8 months into my Maternity Leave (and 2 months into unpaid leave) my thoughts are more along the lines of what can I do which will enable me to stay at home, at least part-time, preferably full-time, with Archie. Working from home would be a start, but realistically, one would require a babysitter - at the very least - in the house to enable you to work free from the distractions of nappy changing, unspecified screeching and missing socks. In my opinion, that is a definite improvement on a 2 hour daily commute and 8 hours in an office, but it's not quite what I'm looking for long-term. I scouted round the internet to find out what other mums are doing and started signing up for mystery shopping work, market research, surveys etc. A lot of them dont actually pay, you just get vouchers to spend on other websites, but hey, a free book is a free book at the end of the day.

Phil proved to be my inspiration. Ask him what his ideal job is and he will answer, totally dead-pan "lottery winner". I read on an internet forum about someone making £12,000 per year just entering free competitions for an hour every day. With nothing to lose, I decided to give it a go. I entered every competition going. Actually, that's not exactly true. I didn't enter the one which offered a concert from some cheesy Boy-band in your living room or any of the other ones I would have been too embarrassed to win, but I did enter a LOT of competitions. That was a month ago and I'm not really ready to tender my resignation at work yet. I don't think that a mug, cuddly elephant and 2 tickets to The Baby Show in London are going to keep Archie in mangoes and yogurt, but I have got something to drink my coffee out of, Archie has a new toy and, er....I have tickets to The Baby Show in London.

I'm going to keep on going with this. It might not earn us a fortune, but it may provide some little luxuries like a weekend in Reykjavik or a hamper of organic products. Maybe one day there will even be some money. If you get any strange Christmas presents from us this year, you will know the reason why.