It sounds like the best of both worlds for moms: earning money while you stay at home with your children. You envision working away on your computer, while your toddler plays happily at your feet, or taking conference calls with corporate bigwigs while you ice your child’s birthday cake. So perfect, so easy, so doable.

Unfortunately there is no perfect blending of domestic and office bliss. That simply isn’t what happens in the real world. Instead, you can’t seem to get anything done because your kids won’t stop arguing. Your conference call has to come to an abrupt end when your youngest has a temper tantrum. And that cake never did get iced.

But despite the pitfalls, more and more women are finding ways to successfully work from home. How do they balance their job and their role as mother when it all happens under the same roof? What are the pitfalls? And how to you overcome them?

One of the biggest challenges is scheduling time to actually get the work done. Some moms find that they have to hire a babysitter or a nanny to watch the kids so they can work without interruption. While this works in some instances, it is a costly solution that can severely reduce your earnings. Instead of hiring a babysitter, an older child may be able to watch the younger ones while you work. This, too, is not without its pitfalls. You will still be interrupted when arguments and disagreements arise between the siblings.

Children aren’t the only ones who will interrupt your work. If you have pets at home, you’ll often be pulled away from your desk to tend to their needs as well. One mom who runs a lucrative business with on-line auctions quickly learned that her dog would go crazy whenever the delivery van would come to the house. She would have to settle down her dog down, who was barking loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss, while also having to deal with the delivery man and keep her children happy. But what can she do? Her children love that dog. And so does she.

One solution to the problem of finding time to get the work done is to work at night when the kids are in bed. To do this, you will have to find a position that doesn’t have set work hours, such as bookkeeping or a position with flexible customer service calls hours. At night, the house is usually quiet and interruptions are rare. However, in order for this to work, you need to be a person who doesn’t require a lot of sleep or who can recharge with your children when they take their naps. Otherwise, you’ll be drowsy and cranky the next day when you have to put in a full day of taking care of your children.

Work-at-home moms face other pitfalls as well. The pay is often low. And worse, there are some employers who routinely reject contract work, claiming poor quality in order to avoid having to pay at all. Rarely do businesses offer healthcare or retirement benefits. It takes careful budgeting and planning to make sure you will have the means to take care of yourself in your elder years.

Finally, the worst pitfall of working from home and being a mother is the lack of adult contact. There is no water cooler chatter of coffee break gossip; mom?s day is full of sticky fingers, ?look what I found under the leaves,? and candy coated wet kisses. The pitfall most moms would choose any day.