Five Great Websites for Working Moms
Being an employee, student and mom is not easy. You’re crazy busy. You’re exhausted. You find yourself icing cookies for your child’s Halloween party at school at midnight. Every minute of your day is booked.
When you have this kind of schedule, planning ahead is essential. So is finding the right tools to save yourself even five extra minutes. Below are some helpful websites to keep you on track with your job, studies and kids.
Are you involved in volunteer activities for your child’s classroom, sports team or Scouts? Even worse – are you in charge of coordinating volunteers for various events? You know how difficult it is to get people to sign up, try to manage endless “reply all” emails, unsynchronized sign-up spreadsheets, remind people when their shifts are, etc. Or perhaps you have trouble keeping track of your commitments to different organizations and need a way to keep it all straight.
Volunteerspot is a website that allows your group to plan an event, manage shift/duty sign-ups, communicate changes or needs to the rest of the group, cancel or change volunteer commitments, and receive automatic reminders via email.
This site is a collection of blog postings from parents about tips and tricks they’ve learned while dealing with children from infants to teenagers. The website functions as a central repository for all those good ideas, or “hacks,” so parents can share thoughts and learn from each other. Postings are organized by age, category, and month of post.
Some interesting postings include: “Baby food stains come clean in a sunbath”, “Is your kid addicted to video games?”, “Turn to youtube for toddler entertainment”, and “Tape combination to padlock so it won’t be forgotten over the summer.”
http://www.google.com/calendar
Google offers a free calendar that allows you to set up your own calendar, share it with other people, and access others’ calendars as well. You can color coordinate events by child, activity, or any other method. You can add a task list and keep track of everyone’s duties. Spouses and older children can add in their own events and send you a notification via email or text message. You can also import other calendars including holidays and professional sports schedules. Ask your child’s daycare or school to put their events on a Google calendar and import it into yours.
Since it’s web-based, you can access the calendar from any computer or smart phone and keep track of everything going on in your busy life.
http://www.idealbite.com/edition/mama-bite
Ideal Bite is a website devoted to finding ways for people to make small changes, or “bites,” that will impact the environment positively. Mama Bite offers great tips for mothers who are trying to go green. Sections such as Health & Care, Food & Drink, School, and Just for Mom contain short articles broken into the issue or idea, the benefits of making the change, suggestions for products or websites, personal anecdotes, and money-saving tips.
Examples of articles include: keeping toys clean without using toxic chemicals, iPhone apps for parents that find recycling centers and help you shop for organic foods, and conserving paper during back-to-school season.
Sittercity is a great way to find a babysitter in your area – or even a pet sitter, senior care professional, housekeeper or tutor. People can post their available jobs online (ex: need sitter for 2 children on Sunday afternoon while I study) or can search the database of over 1 million caregivers nationwide. All sitters go through a screening process and you can run a free background check. One terrific feature is the ability to rate sitters and/or view others’ ratings when narrowing down your choices.
You can screen sitters by years of experience, experience with children of different ages, hourly rate, education level, certifications, special needs experience , other services offered (such as light housekeeping, driving the kids), and languages spoken.
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