droolicious : time too

Baby Tracker: A Baby Journal that Thinks Like Us Moms

elizabeth leach — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The "Round the Clock Baby Tracker" by Time Too makes tracking your newborn’s sleeping, nursing and activities simple. The side by side pages track day and night with twenty four hours of tracking for 3 months.

At the bottom of every page is a daily check list for vitamins, bath, medication, development notes and baby needs. At a time when your life is very chaotic, it’s nice to have an easy way to stay organized.

Time Too has a lot of great organizational products. There’s a Baby Tracker Childcare Record called “All About My Day" for your childcare helper to record important information for you. I’m a big fan of their over-sized wall calendar with stickers to keep your family’s activities organized and large enough for everyone to see. Check out their site here. Baby Trackers can be found here.

Home Scheduling: The Duggar Version, and the Secular Version

Aaron Burgess — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:04:00 GMT

There are two firm rules about housework in my family: One is that everyone pitches in on chores to the best of their abilities, and the second is that if I come home from work and my wife is watching one of the Discovery Channel's documentaries on the Duggars with a frazzled look on her face, it's time to step back and re-evaluate how our system's been working. Because no matter how many kids you have, no matter what your family's belief system may be, there's something to be learned from this home-schooling, Bible-quoting, endlessly inspiring family of 19 (and soon-to-be-20) whose matriarch and patriarch just won "Parent of the Year" honors in their home state of Arkansas.

But just how do the Duggars stay organized? Well, the whole system -- which looks as beautifully simple on paper as it probably seems complicated to any parents who are battling outside pressures and interests -- is right their in the family's FAQ; but the Duggars' actual day-to-day scheduling stems from a guidebook put together by another large, Christian home-schooling family, the Maxwells.

In fact, if you're interested in learning from the experts, you can buy your own copy of the Maxwells' Managers of Their Homes: A Practical Guide to Daily Scheduling for Christian Homeschool Families for $25. It probably goes without saying that the ideal reader here isn't an upwardly mobile agnostic hipster whose kids attend a progressive day school, but you don't need to sit at the other end of a social extreme to get something from the lessons. It does, however, help to be home-schooling, as much of the guide is concerned with managing an academic foundation alongside a moral and after-school one.

And now, for the alternative:

Pretty much every other scheduling book you'd care to name is "secular" in nature, but if you're looking for a Duggars-style family schedule and division-of-labor chart without the Biblical roots, Time Too's new Family Tracker Wall Calendar ($29.95) is designed to handle the gnarliest home schedule while making it easy for everyone from Mom and Dad to kids who are just beginning to read to review. Starting at the beginning of the school year for most of us (September), the Family Tracker runs through August of 2009 and gives you enough room to plot out invitations, RSVPs and future action items alongside the ever-growing lists of daily and weekly to-dos.

Obviously, neither of these is the end-all, be-all solution to keeping your family on track during these hectic times. If you've got a solution, book-form or otherwise, that's been working for your family, we'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Download a Free Vacation Planner from Time Too

Aaron Burgess — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:04:00 GMT

If you've ever tried to plan a summer vacation with kids, you know it can be a logistical nightmare that makes wedding coordination seem easy in comparison. No sooner are you 30,000 feet in the air, pumping Benadryl into the kids for some peace and quiet (did I just say that?) than you remember you forgot to water the plants, neglected to put a hold on your mail, didn't tell your next-door neighbor to keep an eye on the place while you were gone...

Well, it won't make any of the above any easier, but a new, free vacation planner from family-organization hot spot Time Too will at least help you to keep your head screwed on while you're getting ready. Available via PDF, this handy tick sheet gives you an easy way to get all your ducks in a row, and it also lets you assign duties to individual family members so you don't get stuck doing everything yourself. Plus, like we said, it's free.

Grab Time Too's free vacation checklist via the link below, and if you're wondering how you can show your gratitude, visit the company's online store for a number of other, more in-depth family- and baby-centric planners that actually require you to break out your credit card (2009 Family Trackers, here I come...).

[Free Tic Toc Checklist by Time Too - PDF download]