How to Prepare Your Home for Overnight Visitors

Your home is your comfort zone; a place where you can unwind at the end of a long day, but is your home ready to accept overnight visitors? Follow these easy steps and be prepared for them.

Perform a thorough cleaning of the entire house. Vacuum every inch of carpet and rugs and sweep and mop all the other floor coverings. Use disinfectant to clean all counter tops and bathrooms. Change the air filter in the hallway return. Make sure each room of the house is as clean as it can possibly be. Adjust the thermostat temperature to the most comfortable setting for the current season. If you have pets, find out whether your guest has any pet allergies so that you'll know whether or not to keep them separated.

Wash and fold your best towels and leave enough stacked in the bathroom for each day that your visitor will be there. Prepare a basket with soap, shampoo, mouthwash, toothpaste, and shaving supplies, in case they forget a few things. Buy plenty of snacks and drinks and have them chilled well in advance. Rent a few movies as back-up entertainment and leave them near the television. If your visitor has given you any special gifts in the past, find them, dust them off, and leave them out on display to show how much you appreciate the gift.

Create a guest account on your computer and be sure to leave the computer logged into that account so that your visitor may check their email and use the Internet without having access to your personal files and information. It is a good idea to create a restore point on computers running Windows operating system and back up any important files to external storage devices. Lock all filing cabinets and search the house for documents like bank statements or personal mail and put all of it away. Now is a good time to shred any old documents that you no longer need.

When your guest arrives, give them a short tour of the house and show them to their room. Keep the house quiet and give them plenty of time to unpack and relax. Offer them refreshments and tell them where to find you when they are ready. If you will be eating out, prepare a list of restaurants in advance and allow your guest to choose their favorite type of food. Enjoy your time together without worrying about the condition of your home and without the stress of making last-minute decisions.


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How to Protect Pictures and Video of your Family

Digital cameras continue to grow in popularity. It is becoming the norm for precious memories to exist exclusively in a digital format. The average person copies photos to their computer and saves them, but how many of those pictures are ever printed on photo paper? What happens when that computer eventually crashes?

Save your pictures onto a local hard disk drive. One method for sharing, organizing, and storing photos, which is becoming very popular are the online photo sites. They allow members to upload, organize, share, edit, and print pictures. The problem with these sites is that once the photograph is uploaded to them, the member will eventually have to pay that company each time photo prints are needed. That's fine as long as the company stays in business, as long as their quality remains intact, and as long as the member doesn't need pictures in an hour. These are several things to consider and should encourage everyone to at least keep backup copies of photos whether the online photo websites are used or not.

Store a copy of your pictures on a protected PC also. Saving pictures exclusively to the family computer that everyone uses is not very secure or reliable either. A computer that is used daily to connect to the Internet is exposed to many dangerous threats that can corrupt data and ultimately destroy, not only pictures and precious memories, but any hard work which is stored there. It's alright to save files and pictures to that computer, but precautions should be taken immediately to protect them.

Use a hardware firewall to protect the computer from the Internet. Firewalls are available at all electronic retail stores that sell computers and are easy to install and configure. Use a trusted antivirus program to monitor the computer for harmful viruses, Trojans, and worms. Install a spare hard disk drive into the computer and either manually copy important files to it or use a software backup utility to do it automatically.
An even better idea is to build a stand alone computer that is used exclusively for storing pictures, important file, and videos. Do not connect this computer to the Internet and be sure it is password-protected and logged-out when not in use. Install a DVD writer in this computer and make DVD backup copies of all important files and keep the DVD's stored in a locked box or filing cabinet in a temperature-controlled room. If this computer needs to be networked to the computer that uses the Internet, then it is possible to block Internet usage on the backup computer and still send files back and forth between the two.


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How to Announce a Pregnancy to Family and Friends

So you just found out that you are going to be a parent. How exciting! How should you inform your family and friends? Here are some suggestions.

One idea is to have a huge gathering of family and friends and tell everybody at once, but the problem with that is that you don't get to see everyone's reaction. I prefer a more personal visit with each person so that you can share a conversation with each one and see the joy on their faces when you share your good news. Save the big parties for the baby showers or just have a big gathering after everybody knows.

To begin, take a piece of paper and write a list of your closest family and friends. You will want to arrange these names in order by when they will receive the good news. In my opinion the parents of the expecting mother and father, if they're still around, should be the first ones to know the good news, since they will be your child's grandparents.

Decide who lives close enough to visit and who will need to receive a call instead. Plan this carefully because good news travels fast. You don't want someone very close to you to receive a phone call from someone else before you are able to tell them. Plan your visits so that you can make phone calls to the out-of-town friends and family while you are on the road from one in-person visit to the other. This is the most efficient way of reaching more people in a shorter amount of time.

For your parents and grandparents, it is a good idea to present them with a gift; something with a significant reference to grandkids or great-grandkids. This gives an element of surprise so that you can watch the look on their face change as they realize what you're telling them. It is very exciting for everyone involved. A book about how to spoil grandkids or a picture frame or flip book with "grandkids" engraved on it are some suggestions.

Take pictures while you are visiting with your friends and family and then write about the experience, including the date and time that you told them. These will make interesting entries into your baby's book and you'll be glad that you took the time to do it when you read them years from now.

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