her daily docket is my lifesaver

I just want to take this moment to say how awesome Tsh – aka Simple Mom – is for creating and sharing her Daily Docket. It is like a to-do list for a given day, but it is so much more than that. It helps you prioritize your tasks and keep all the essential information for one day together.

Her regular Daily Docket fills an entire 8 1/2″ x 11″ page (or A4 for you Europeans), and I have to admit that it’s a little too much for me. If I get up in the morning and my to-do list fills an entire page, it just overwhelms the hell out of me. But she now has a smaller edition which she calls her “Pocket Docket,” and it fills just half a page. This is the perfect size for me. I can keep track of my to-do list, any appointments, what’s for dinner and any notes I need to make along the way. And it keeps me from constantly flipping through my day planner, family planner and the inevitable multiple to-do lists fluttering around my home.

I don’t use the Pocket Docket all the time, but I go through phases where despite my good intentions, I am so disorganized that I seem to forget at least one Very Important Thing nearly every day. At times like these, I print out a few Pocket Dockets and get things back on track. Right now, for example, I’m using them to prioritize my tasks as I’m slowly but steadily recovering from my sinus infection – I want to make sure I don’t do too much, but I want to get the most important things done.

Check out Tsh’s explanation of her Daily Docket: My Daily Docket is My Daily Lifesaver

Also, take a look at her other very useful downloads!

spring cleaning this autumn

Remember, oh, 4 months ago, when I said I’d be joining Simple Mom’s Spring Cleaning Party? Well, I finally got started. I guess in our household, it’s going to be more of an autumn cleaning party. Frankly, I think autumn’s a better time anyway. There’s a crispness in the air that gives me far more energy than the sunny warmth of spring. Spring is really like a sleeping pill for me. Also, there’s an excitement in the air related to the new school year and approaching holidays that seems to give me an extra bit of motivation to tackle big projects.

Anyway, we decided to skip Simple Mom’s “clean sweep,” since we’ve been doing such sweeps once every couple weeks for the past year or so. We’re always surveying our stuff, deciding what we could part with, and then either selling it immediately or storing it for future donating/selling. Simple Mom’s philosophy about spring cleaning is that it’s not about turning our homes into magazine spreads – it’s really about three basic steps that we apply thoroughly in the entire house once a year or so: decluttering, cleaning and organizing. It ultimately makes our homes more beautiful, more practical and more livable. We moved right on to the largest, most difficult room in our place: the living room. This is what Simple Mom says about this room:

Your living room is probably the most used space in your home.

Oh boy, is it ever! In our case, it also makes up nearly half the square footage of our entire apartment. It’s a very large room, and it holds a lot of furniture and a lot of stuff. It took Toffi and me the whole day to get this room up to snuff, and there are definitely some future projects waiting for us, but it was such an amazing feeling to have a truly clean, decluttered and organized living room when Marie got home from daycare. She’s only two, but even she noticed the difference!

Here’s just one example of many. The wide shot doesn’t really show how dirty the place was, but that’s probably a good thing. You can see how cluttered it was, and that’s really the key part. Marie was so amazed when she got home, that she insisted on helping me show you just how much nicer it looks now.

Before

After

cloth diapering love

Simple Mom, one of my favorite blogs (my first read of the day, actually), is having a cloth diaper giveaway! As part of her Cloth Diapering 101 series, she has reviewed a number of cloth diapers and is having a giveaway for several kinds. You should really check out all the wonderful information!

a spring cleaning party with simple mom

As you can see to the right, I’ll be joining Simple Mom’s Spring Cleaning Party the week after next. I bought her ebook a few weeks ago with the intention of giving our apartment a thorough workup, but illness and laziness have prevented me from really getting started. How fortunate, then, that Simple Mom is having a Spring Cleaning Party to keep slackers like me accountable! You can join, too. Just visit her site, read her post about the party, grab the button and get ready to give your house a makeover!

support new moms

Ugh. Sick again. So while I’m too congested to offer a post of my own, I have a link for y’all.

Know anyone who’s just had or is about to have a baby? Wondering what to give her? Melodie at Breastfeeding Moms Unite has the answer for you!