Firstly don't try to figure this out with kids jumping all over you! Choose a time they are out or in bed or just stick them in front of the telly for a while

First you need to install Audacity, if you have not done this then go and do it now . Ready? ok, put on your headset and we will begin . . .

The Audacity screen looks like the picture below, the big round buttons work just as you might expect from using a CD player, or tape recorder (remember them?) Press the big red round button to begin recording and you should now see a blue waveform running across the screen. Now try speaking into the microphone, "testing testing 1-2-3" is the traditional thing to say, but don't let that limit you.

As you speak you will see the blue waveform dance about and some little bars moving at the top of the screen. Click the brownish yellow square button to stop recording, and you can press the green triangle to play back the results below you can see what the screen should look like, and here is what I said.

Audacity is pretty much turns your PC into a full multi-track recording studio it is pretty powerful and you can do all sorts of fun things with it, but you do need to get your head round the multi-track thing. If you hit the record button again, it won't overwrite your previous recording, it will start a new track. On screen it will look like this:

and it will sound like this so if you don't want to talk over yourself you need to remove tracks you don't want by pressing the x at the top left of each track window.

You can have a play with all the tools on screen, but first lets get the volume levels right. There is a tempting little slider next to a picture of a microphone, but leave that alone for the moment whilst we get the microphone in the right place in relation to your mouth, not too far away, but not right in front of your mouth either. If you have the microphone too close you will be breathing on it, It will sound like this and you will probably end up bumping and scraping it which sounds like this and we don't want that do we? So once you have the microphone in a comfortable place start to play with the volume settings. Ideally you want the blue waveform to be dancing about as you talk, but it should never hit the edges, even at the loudests parts of your story. If the volume is too high then as well as being loud you will get clipping, which sounds like this , so don't do that. If it is too quiet the blue wave will look pretty flat and your voice becomes hard to hear over the background noise like this .

Do spend some time playing with Audacity, with the multi-track system you could read a story then record a second track with an instrument like a tambourine to mark the point where you turn the page for example.