Are You Domestically Challenged? Today's GCC girlfriend, Alana Morales, can help.

More and more women are opting to leave the rat race in favor of staying home to raise their children. While most of these moms are happy with their decision to put their career on hold, they are also discovering that being an at home mom is much more difficult than they thought. Luckily for them, there is a new book that offers humorous support and practical advice just for them.

Domestically Challenged - A Working Moms Survival Guide To Becoming A Stay At Home Mom by Alana Morales is written as a guidebook to new at home moms to offer them support and practical ways to adjust to their new lifestyle.

Domestically Challenged tackles such tough topics as the myth of the Super Mom (hint – there isn’t one) and keeping the kids entertained without hiring a circus. Alana's book is intended to help moms find ways to make their life as an at home mom easier.

“When I was looking for books about being an at home mom, I found a lot that were either religious or talked about my spiritual journey through motherhood. It was 3:00 in the afternoon and my kids and I were still in our pajamas. I needed to know how to manage running the house full time, not a spiritual pep talk.”

Alana, who also writes a bi-weekly humor column and co-hosts a weekly online radio show for moms, wants her book to help new at home moms find systems that work for them so they can actually enjoy being home.

Mother's Day is almost a week away, and this year I'll be running in the Y-Me race again in honor of my late mother-in-law, Jan. It's a great way to spend Mother's Day, lots of families and kids and it has got to be just about the most emotional way to spend an early Sunday morning - raising money for breast cancer research. If you're interested in running in your own local race, check this out for more information.

I know divorce isn't something to laugh about, but when one of my best friends was faced with the new world of the un-marrieds, we did manage to find a few chuckles along the way. And the result of all our phone calls and emails was a new understanding of what it's like to go through a divorce and to be the friend of someone going through a divorce. So, we did what any woman who fancies herself a wordsmith does - we wrote a book. See, the thing was, when my friend was going through the trials and trevails of divorcing, she wanted a book that told it to her straight - the good (yes, there was some good), the bad and the ugly. But all she found was psychobabble by people with PhD's and very little personal experience. And, because she couldn't find what she was looking for, we decided to create it. And now it's going to be published (well, in 2007 it will be published). Here's a little description:

Everyone knows the statistics – half of all our married friends will end up divorced (yes, now’s the time to look around the room and try to figure out which ones look like they’re on the verge of divvying up the CD collection). But only “other people” get divorced, right? Certainly not the couple we’ve known since the night they met over lime Jell-O shots and bonded over a game of darts. And definitely not the friends we see everyday in a framed photo on our bookshelf, a picture of two smiling couples on Martha’s Vineyard - the last childless vacation we would all spend together before starting our families.

No, it couldn’t happen to us. We were still young. Still in love. Even in our thirties we were betting that we were immune to statistics, still relying on the idea that only people who didn’t know better got divorced. It didn’t happen to us. And then it did.

BETTER OFF WITHOUT HIM is designed to help women at a time when the statistics win out, and the math hits home.

BETTER OFF WITHOUT HIM provides practical advice, tough love, and a touch of empathetic girlfriend humor. Part chick-lit-self-help, part advice-how-to with a twist, BETTER OFF WITHOUT HIM is for every woman who thought she wouldn’t make it past the first night alone, only to make it through with flying colors thanks to a little help from her friends. Because even though statistics tell us that marriages will come and go, girlfriends are forever.