High Maintenance Mom

I've been testing out new calendars for the past few months and finally found one I love - Mom's Plan-It 2008 Softcover Engagement Calendar (if the calendar is not available from Amazon, try calendars.com). As a mom I still want a nice calendar but I don't want to pay as much I as used to. My calendar needs are: something light I can carry with me, nice paper that won't bleed, a subtle design (no thick black lines), open spaces for writing that are big enough to hold my schedule, and, if possible, stickers. All my appointments are also entered into Google Calendar because my husband and I can check each other's schedules before committing to events (more on that later)...

I like having a calendar I can use to write about my day and I don't have an iPhone. The Mom's Plan It Engagement calendar meets several needs. It has 2 inch wide perforated columns on the sides of each page - one side is for a Grocery List and the other side is for This Week's Menu. The Grocery List has four categories, Produce, Dairy/Meats, Bakery, and Other whereas This Week's Menu is lined. The center section contains the days of the week from Monday to Sunday, each with several inches of space for writing.

I fill in our shopping list as we run out of items and I've found having the weekly menu space forces me to write what we might eat for the week. Once I've written the menu, I finish filling out the shopping list. When I go shopping, I try to remember to bring the bookmark sized list from the calendar. It's hard to get across how well this system is working for me - it makes me smile and provides a place to keep track of exercise, when I change my contact lenses, meetings, school events, doctor's appointments (I missed two eye doctor appts for the kids last year) and my menstrual cycle.

Tearing out the shopping list makes it really easy to open the calendar to the appropriate week (the back of the list is last week's menu). I also find that when I forget the list, I can still come home and check off what I bought. The things I forget to buy either go on the next week's list or I go back to the store (usually I go to two grocery stores every weekend but I'm trying to cut it down to one).

I'm not as good at entering information into our Google Calendar as my planner but we've tried a lot of calendars and it's by far the easiest way to schedule a family. An added bonus is that we can subscribe to B's school calendar so we don't have to enter his events. And the Google Calendar has a nice template for printing so I just started printing out the month view and posting it on the fridge.