High Maintenance Mom

Have you seen the new Shutterfly personal photo web sites? I just created one for our family with pictures of the kids from this year. In the past I have sent pictures by email but the file sizes are large and not everyone likes their mailboxes to be full of kid pictures. To avoid filling mailboxes, I occasionally sent links to our Shutterfly pictures - with Shutterfly invited visitors do not need to join or have a password. But now that it's really easy to create a beautiful site to showcase the pictures, I plan to upload my pictures more often. I also like that I can choose who I want to view the site so my comments and pictures are private. Did I mention how easy it is? Click the Shutterfly image to check it out!

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)...

It amazes me how many misconceptions I had about being a working mother. I always knew it was hard, required time balancing, and who knows what to do about cooking, but geez. Now everyday I can hardly wake up. I was never organized before, how can I do it now? I am going to have to put my life (did i ever have one? oh right I was a graduate student...) on hold or embrace this new need to start sleeping at eight pm requirement. WHO does that? It is absurd.

Clutter is a big problem in our house. We were both pack rats well before we had kids and didn't anticipate how much effort would be needed to keep the house presentable with kids. Over the past year we've been working on a faster system for organizing our mail and we've managed to come up with something that works for both of us. The system is based on four baskets -- To Read, To Pay, To File, and To Shred...

About a month ago as I rushed from work to daycare and then home in a panic about the time and what we would have for dinner, I realized that there had to be a better way. Friends had mentioned that they made dinners for the whole week on Sunday but it sounded difficult to organize. I decided to start slowly, making Friday night pizza night. I buy the following items every week from Trader Joes...