I posted this on my Blog today and thought it would be apropos here!

I get an e mail every day from Google listing all the Blogs it spiders or crawls for the words "Stay at Home Dad", I signed up for this free service. I did it just to keep up with all that is hip, hot and happening in our small world.

There are the regulars that show up every day and those like myself that show up weekly or there abouts. The regulars include Doodaddy at DooDaddy, AMR over at Here Goes Everything - Life As A Stay At Home Dad, The Texas Trio- Stay at Home Dad of Triplets among others, then the semi regular posters boys like Joeprah, myself at MHD, and Mike Adamick at Cry It Out: Adventures of a stay-at-home Dad. Then there is the rogue post like this one that occasionally shows up, this guy Jarko at http://jarkkolaine.com/2008/06/06/its-the-journey-stupid/ who Blogs about wanting and striving to be a Stay at Home Dad and running an Internet Business while staying home with the kids, I do not mean to pick on this guy, as there are many others. But c'mon get a life!

I know of 0 (Zero, nil, the Big 0, goose egg) dads who set out and wanted to be in this profession. We all just kind of fell into it in one way or another, no high school career ambitions to be an At Home Dad. What would a school counselor say upon hearing of this ambition to be an At Home Dad? Would he get help? I mean this is not a bad job or anything but you just cannot train for a life as an At Home Dad by taking nothing but Home Economic classes. An At Home Dad has to be athletically diverse and conscious about the health of his family, involved in the community/school, you do not just sit at home and watch TV as many of these rogue Blog posters imply we do. On top of all that, you have to fall into it through marriage, economic climate and what works best for your family. It was never a goal and something to strive toward, and running a successful Internet Business in addition to being an At Home Dad does not even play into the situation. One, because in the early days your overly tired and just plain too busy,and two,  if anything you post to a Blog and hope there are no misspellings, it reads good and it gets read/hits.

 Do(es) your young one(s) think they have to be on the move every minute of every day? Every day before school (school starts at 10:40 AM), weekends even earlier, he thinks he needs to go play at somebody's house. Most days he is up by eight or 8:30 and comes down for a quick dose of waffles, cartoons or Power Rangers, milk and his lunch desires for the school and he is gone to get dressed.

He then comes down and presses to go to somebody's house. I have set a time where he can't go knock on doors before 10AM except for the immediate neighbor on our stage right who's Keeper Mom to Sierra, the reason being they are up early anyway because of Sierra's older brother and sister need to get ready for school. In addition, he cannot knock on their door before 9AM and later if their dad has not left for work yet.

Another reason is Sierra escaped this last Monday, I think it was, and was ringing our doorbell at seven when I was showering, post Elliptical. I have had other young kids come knock on our door before 10 and I was not at all happy about it and let them know that it was not at all cool to visit before 10 and to come back after 10; even if they have to ask their mom what time it is.

If you are a parent to the 6-10 year, old range of kids.  What is your acceptable to for receiving kids to play and to let yours go knock on the door?

Then there is trying to reel them back in at night, but that is a completely different program altogether!