We at the Houkhouse have almost survived another crazy busy summer following some important life changes – Steve’s job being the biggie. While my blogging took back seat, my family organization skills had to come front and center. Those talents have proven stronger than I really knew they could be. In reflecting a bit on just how we’ve made it through the new job, the out of town training, the adjustment to both parents working nights, the change in daily routines, a nanny, summer break, swim team practice and meets, etc. etc, I’m looking at the resources we’ve called in. Our flexibility and tenacity have been challenged – but we rose to that challenge, and with some measure of success, I might add. I’ve identified some of the tools that have helped us step up. Patience, love, and the grace of God will always top the list. After that, there’s some great tools and resources that making planning a busy life much easier.
I’ve just found a new one and I’m in LOVE WITH IT! You’ll find it at cozicentral.com and not only is it very helpful, it’s also very FREE! You’ll download basic software to your home PC. It includes a calendar/planning system and really cool photo collage screen savers. The screen saver is optional, but we really like it. It randomly pulls photos from wherever you tell it (we used our entire My Pictures file) and combines them in many different layouts. It’s so cool to sit and watch them and see old friends, kids growing up, and in general, good memories.
The heart of Cozi, however, is the calendar. It works much like I remember Outlook working in the old days, only so much better! The calendar is customized with columns you choose, by family member name. You even assign different colors. Everything goes in the schedule color-coded by who the task applies to. A great feature is that you aren’t locked into one way of inserting info into the calendar – you type in real language. It’s like actually talking to your calendar. It comes also with shopping lists – pre-loaded so you just select what you’d like. You get to add family photos and contact numbers and it can message your email or cell right off the home view.
The most workable feature is the selling point for me (even thought it’s free). The calendar is accessible through Cozi central by all your family members (password protected) on the web at any time. That means my Nanny can check the schedule from her computer and Marlee can add in important info in computer lab time at school and Steve can see it when he’s at church on the youth retreat, etc. I’m on it at work now and when someone asks if I’d like to make a schedule change, I just pull up my handy online calendar!
If you try it, let me know what you think. I love to find good ideas that help us with our busy lives.
Another quick tip I’ve found is a cool paper calendar, which I use for planning all the daily, picky little details. Not the big appointments, but how person A is getting to appointment B from location C, transported by Mommy H. You know what I mean?
3M makes a great Post-It calendar that is colorful and fun patterned. I found it in hot pink and yellow. It has 52 sheets on the pad (ahh, convenient for the weeks of the year) and comes with 6 mini pads of coordinating post it notes down the side. The whole thing can hang with Command strips (included), or you can use as we do by tearing each week off and hanging on the fridge. It has days of the week across the top, making columns, and blank lines on the side, for us to write in all our fam and all our individual schedules/info for that week. It makes our family meeting fun and easy to figure out the week’s schedule. I tried to find an online photo, but it must be too new. I hope you can find it – ours came from Office Max.
Good luckwith your “getting it together” and I’d love to hear some of your tried and true tips as well.
