Everyone loves having guests stay. Out-of-towners offer you the luxury of exploring parts of your neighbourhood you’d normally not visit in the daily work-more-work-family grind.

But what do you do when those beloved guest expect you to be at their beck and call, day in, day out?

This recently happened to me with a friend who’d come to stay for three weeks. Three long weeks. Hosting people, while a joy, is hard enough for a few days, let alone when you’re balancing a multitude of work commitments and raising children. The household routine is imperative, and it becomes very difficult to be the relaxed and adventurous entertainer for such a long period, especially if your guests are not of the independent variety.

Couples are easy, they amuse themselves. A solo traveller, however...

But I get it. It’s not a blast being in your own company for extended periods of time, it is more fun being led, and shown, and informed.

I recommend compiling a list of activities for your future guest, and emailing it prior to arrival. Perhaps assert the importance of your weekly obligations, and advise which days you’ll be available to be the friend, as opposed to the employee, the CEO or the parent.

I’ve found it particularly helpful to introduce people to other nearby friends, then they are also free to form their own friendships and gather more inside knowledge about just how to pass the time.

Guests, we love you! But sadly we are not also on holiday! The best guest also helps with the kids, and takes control of the kitchen. It is the greatest thank-you gift known to a parent.

And equally fun is an excuse to stay indoors.  Contrary to New Zealand indoor activities, the choice and quality in New England definitely rocks.  The aquariums, museums & bowling alleys are amazing and have provided us with a good helping of brain food. 

We're here for another few weeks and while I'll miss the culture of America I don't think I'll be sad to say bye-bye to winter.  Next year I think we'll try another season, I haven't jumped in a pile of leaves in years.

Get your children pets they said. It’ll teach them about caring for others and prepare them for the reality of death they said. Guinea pigs are a great choice they said. Okay, why not? I said.
 
A month ago we took the kids to the pet store to buy a guinea pig, the man at the pet store told us that they are very social and needed company. Twenty minutes later we were walking out of the store with two female guinea pigs, and enough accessories to keep an army of guinea pigs entertained for months.
 
Everything was great until a little over a week ago I came home to find one of our guinea pigs attempting to make love to the other. After a quick trip to the vets to confirm that our two female guinea pigs were not in fact two females, but brother and sister we were forced to make the decision to have the male desexed. The vet had warned us, that because they are so small, there was a chance the animal might not survive the operation, but it was a risk we decided to take because I am not ready to have any more kids. I already have two—a litter of inbred guinea pigs was just not in my future.
 
Around two pm on the day of the operation we got a call from the vet. Our little guinea pig hadn’t woken up, what would we like to do with the body?
 
When my boys came home from school we sat them down and told them that their guinea pig wasn’t going to be coming home. That he was going to be a flower or a cloud now instead. I was holding back my tears, this was my children’s first pet and he barely made it more than a month before we were burying him. Instead of crying though my boys nodded sadly, then Lucas asked, “So, can we get a new one?”
 
I spent an hour in my room crying about how fickle life is. My boys jumped on the trampoline and shot each other with water pistols, oblivious perhaps to the finality of death. The next day we brought home a new guinea pig to keep the other from getting lonely. Life goes on, I suppose. 

I plan to continue to write about all the things you don’t need for a baby, not out of a twisted desire to take down the baby product industry but just because I was there once too. I bought a lot of junk that it turned out I never used, and even if I didn't add up the hundreds of dollars wasted, the added burden and impact on the environment of all this excess and unnecessarily consumerism is enough to give pause.
 
As I sat down to write today’s blog about dangerous baby bouncers I realized that I spend a lot of time talking in these blogs and on the internet about myself, but probably most of you reading this have no idea who the I behind Hushamok actually is.

 
If I was meeting you at before school drop off I would introduce myself as Julie, the mom of that six year old boy over there about to fall out of that tree. If we met at a business meeting I would be Julie, owner of Hushamok, an independent eco-friendly baby furniture company. If we met at a party I would be Julie, the wife of Mark and then I would have to excuse myself and leave because seriously? Since when do I have time to go to parties?
 
It is not often I will meet someone and be just Julie. I am always, mother, wife or full-time worker. I used to be just Julie, years ago. But if I met Julie, the girl who studied Natural Resources, who followed around the Grateful Dead as a teenager and spent hours in cafes drinking coffee after coffee while reading Camus, I wouldn't recognize her.
 
Sometimes I miss being just Julie. Being a working mother is stressful, hard and there is never enough time for everyone. Someone always misses out. I don’t resent my children or my husband or my company for the fact that it always me that misses out. I don’t have time for parties or to read a book, even to breathe most of the time. 
 
It’s easy to get caught up in the stress of every day life, with balancing the different parts of your life, and sometimes it’s just too much. Some nights, after a day of meetings I want to go hide in the bathroom and not come out until every one is asleep. I just have to remind myself that one day, there won’t be anyone to hide from in the bathroom and that scares me more than all the lego tantrums in the world combined. Because right now I still have two little boys who look at me like I hung the moon, one of whom indignantly told a woman who suggested he looked like his father yesterday, “No. I’m a mommy’s boy not a daddy’s boy!” 

Nice to meet you, I’m Julie, mother of Lucas, Leo and Hushamok.   
 

Hey Julie, didn't you just write an entry about how you don't need a stroller? And now you're telling me not to buy a front pack. Really?

While I am aware that the suggestion of carrying your baby so to your close to your body seems like the ideal solution; the problem with many baby front packs is that they can cause long lasting spinal damage to your baby. I say many because in the past ten years the infant carriers have evolved somewhat to give the baby more support, but are still inferior, in my opinion, to a sling.

The reason for parents to be wary of papoose style carriers is because of the compromising position they put the growing spine in. When the infant is upright, with their legs hanging down they are forced support their own body weight at the base of their spine, putting unnatural stress on the lower spine. If an infant is supporting their own body weight instead of being supported by an outside force it can adversely affect the development of the spinal curves and, in some cases, cause spondylolisthesis.