Silence. That’s the beautiful word that describes the magical time every afternoon when both of my preschoolers sleep. Life with a 3-year-old and 7-month-old is busy. Not busy in the “I-have-four-errands-to-run-around-work” sense. Oh, no. Busy in the “I-have-to-prepare-lunch-for-my-daughter-and-I-while-breastfeeding-the-baby-and-doing-a-load-of-laundry-when-my-daughter-falls-down-the-stairs-and-must-be-taken-to-the-ER-for-stitches” sense. This is a never-stop-moving-or-thinking busy. A no-time-to-think-of-myself-at-all busy. The kind of busy that makes going to the bathroom a luxury. But, for those one-and-a-half to two hours of naptime each day, I can join the rest of humanity online—catch up on email, float around a bit on facebook, balance our checkbook and do our online banking, read newspapers, and play mindless games. When I tire of games, I go to Mechanical Turk—mindless games that pay money. So far, I’ve completed surveys, rewritten sentences, translated documents from Spanish, transcribed other people’s speeches, visited random websites, and offered my opinions on a myriad of websites, products, art projects, and clothing. The variety keeps me from getting bored, and when something sounds boring or tedious, I just don’t choose to do it. Who knew someone wanted to pay me for my online time? As an amazon.com junkie, I have so far re-invested all of my MTurk earnings on amazon purchases, including my husband’s Father’s Day gift. It feels so good to buy things I would have bought anyway with someone else’s money. And the best part is—I have done all this while my two little angels slept. Ahhh, the sweet sound of silence!