Dayton Daily News:

LONDON -- Asked whether staying at home with her children is rewarding, Karen Post, a pretty young mother of four, just laughed.
 
"No pay, no positive feedback, no respect, no performance measures -- how could the answer be yes? But it is," she said.
 
Post, once an accountant, is part of a generation of British women known here as "yummy mummies" -- a term that has even made it into the Collins English Dictionary. As The Sunday Times of London recently reported, "yummy mummydom has suddenly become aspirational. Young professional women are not just baking cakes, they are abandoning the high-flying careers they seemed destined for and taking up homemaking full-time."
 
"Yummy mums" shun the notion that they must have both career and family to feel satisfied. But they do believe they are entitled to enjoy themselves, in the home and away.
 
"I often think about all the good things about being at work -- mostly being respected for my ideas and output -- but I try to put that energy into my own family, and I do believe it pays off in my children's self-esteem and security," said Post, 35.
 
Yet this mother of children aged 5 months to 9 years still finds time for her book club and "girls' nights out."
 
Retailers have taken note of the trend, elbowing each other aside to supply mothers with the fashionable necessities of housekeeping.
 
One of the first people to cash in was the attractive star cook Nigella Lawson -- who cooked lunch for President Bush on his recent trip to Britain -- with her best-selling book How to Be a Domestic Goddess.
 
But many others have followed.
 
Gucci has started marketing its own oven gloves and apron. So has Cath Kidston, who operates a chain of stylish interior-design stores. The stationer Smythson has come out with a chic leather notebook emblazoned with the words "Domestic Goddess." Cox & Cox is selling heart-shaped buckets for those who like to mop.

Even the posh department store Harvey Nichols started selling spa-inspired luxury cleaning products earlier this year.