When you decided to stay at home, you probably thought about the quality time you'd spend with your kids and the wonderful meals you would cook. Maybe you even thought you would do some decorating or take up yoga. Later you realized things would be different. Your house is messier. You still have days where the kids drive you crazy. And then you wonder - what did I get myself into? Relax. Domestically Challenged can help. Written as a humorous guidebook, this book will show new stay at home moms how to: . Keep the kids entertained without hiring a circus . Find ways to keep up with housework, short of hiring a housekeeper (though we'd like to!) . Deal with the emotional aspects of her new job (including boredom and every mom's favorite - guilt) . And do such outlandish things such as finding time for herself.

Many people might assume that growing up in a town with less than three hundred residents would be quite dull and uneventful. But for author Tina Rye Sloan, growing up in tiny Detroit, Alabama, was anything but boring. In her delightful memoir Southern Serendipity, Sloan shares some rather entertaining and almost unbelievable accounts of life in the Deep South. From discovering numerous mischievous uses for dish soap to miraculously surviving a slide off the tin roof of a barn-propelled by a slick coating of baby oil-Sloan provides a look at the rich upbringing she was fortunate to have, despite her family's poverty. Southern Serendipity also offers a glimpse into Southern small-town life during the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. Sloan inadvertently yet artfully describes many facets of Southern culture, from colloquialisms to gardening to education. The collection of heartwarming stories in Southern Serendipity is based around several families whose lives in this small Southern town were woven together like strong, colorful threads in a tapestry.

This humorous, practical and God-centered book addresses that over-whelmed feeling that often strikes women trying to balance many responsibilities. It proves that homes can be places of peace, joy and order.

Given the fact that two-thirds of all intrastate wars since 1945 have included foreign interventions, what drives sovereign states to support non-state conflict parties? In order to understand causes and calculations of this particular type of third party intervention, this book connects some of the most important contemporary debates in international relations, ranging from security cooperation between states and non-state actors to the effects of intervention on both local conflict dynamics and interstate relations. Presenting a new theoretical framework and a multidimensional concept of support (endorsement, hosting, as well as financial and military assistance), this book establishes a systematic path between international as well as domestic incentives and specific types of sponsorship policies. In a subsequent comparative analysis, the author examines conditions and dynamics of Syria’s cooperation with Fatah, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, and Hizballah from 1964 to 2006.

Autoethnography in the 21st Century offers interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of autoethnography from around the globe. Volume I, Colonialism, Immigration, Embodiment, Belonging examines forms of autoethnography as a decolonizing and dehegemonizing practice in the allegedly post-racial, post-colonial, and post-(hetero)sexist twenty-first century. Contributors use autoethnographic methods and practices to interrogate the dominant cultural practices and political exigencies that have shaped their lives, their arts, and their academic work on bicultural, queer, gender-subordinated, or post-colonial experience. It features autobiographical and anthropological poetics, autotheory, and fieldwork grounded in Africa, Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, and the United States. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of critical autoethnography, communication, cultural and gender studies, and other related disciplines. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Being a keeper at home demands that women possess a wide range of skills. Now the training, skills and tips every woman needs are all here in one delightful-to-read volume. Five minutes a day, 52 weeks a year is all a woman needs to get the most of this inspiring, helpful read.

Just as The Babysitter’s Club series successfully captured a generation of young girls, Cyndy Salzmann’s Friday Afternoon Club series lays claim to moms who cherish long-standing friendship…and a bit of mystery. While juggling the responsibilities of carpool, laundry, and ballet lessons, this group of close friends find time to act as sleuths, unraveling mysteries, and gaining spiritual truths along the way. Readers will readily identify with these richly drawn characters caught in the chaos of raising a family, maintaining friendships, and sorting out the items of intrigue that draws them in.