Cozi Blog

5 Ways to Keep Cool During school

The new school year is here. Are you beginning to feel the stress of morning madness and the craziness of the after-school juggling act? Make this school year different. Implementing simple systems that family members make part of their daily routine can bring relief. Children of all ages may benefit from a few organization systems in their life, and the home is a great place to start. Children as well as parents have a need for order and consistency in their daily routine.

Here are five ideas or strategies to help you and your children have a successful school year.

1. Plan your days and months with a calendar that is suited for your family's busy schedule and all activities.
   Whether you prefer a paper calendar, a dry-erase calendar or a computer calendar, there are many options to fit your style. Be sure that it's easy to get access to and that you look at it daily, so you can plan in advance. Involve your child with helping to keep his or her calendar up to date.
2. Establish a place for your child to unload his or her backpack.
   For papers that need to be signed and returned to school, teach children to place them in a designated area, where they will be easily spotted. Children also need a place to put completed schoolwork and artwork, once removed from the backpack. This place may be temporary until a decision has been made as to what will be kept. Provide your child with an oversize, acid-free photo album that can be used to store the most treasured pieces from each school year.
3. Establish a place to keep backpacks for the evening after they are emptied.
   A hook in an easily accessible location will help keep clutter off the floor.
4. Make sure your child knows where to find supplies for doing homework.
   I have heard stories from adults who were challenged as a child trying to do homework because they could never find the scissors, tape, glue, pencils, crayons, etc., that were needed to get assignments done.
5. When it comes to making a quick lunch, prepare what you can the evening before.
   Keep lunch-making items such as sacks, baggies, change, containers and grab-and-go foods in a place that allows you to quickly toss lunch together.

 

Laura Leist, CPO, is a speaker, productivity consultant and the best-selling author of Eliminate Chaos: The 10-Step Process to Organize Your Home & Life. She founded the Seattle-based organizing services firm Eliminate Chaos in 2000 and is the President of NAPO (National Association of Professional Organizers). Laura is a frequent guest on TV, radio and has been published in several national newspapers and magazines.

Copyright Eliminate Chaos. Reprinted with permission.

Cozi Wins 2009 Seal of Approval from the National Parenting Center

Here at Cozi, we take feedback very seriously. We actually collect all the feedback we receive each month from Cozi families and share it (anonymously, of course) with everyone at the company. We love to hear what’s working well for you, and what you’d like us to change.

On a national scale, we just received some pretty exciting feedback, and we’re bursting to share it with you. We’re thrilled to announce that Cozi has won the National Parenting Center Seal of Approval for the 2nd year in a row. This is one of the most prestigious awards we could receive, and this independent organization has given Cozi its highest recommendation, citing Cozi’s “superb design and quality.”

Now, that’s definitely feedback worth celebrating!

The National Parenting Center’s Seal of Approval program is an independent testing process used to judge products geared toward parents and children. Judges include parents, kids, educators, and panelists from the National Parenting Center. The Seal of Approval program is designed to help parents sort through the thousands of products and sites competing for their attention and identify the very best products available for their families.

What did the testers have to say about Cozi? According to the National Parenting Center:

“Cozi.com drew rave reviews from our testers who loved discovering a website that really got what it means to be a busy parent these days.”

What’s more, in recommending Cozi, The National Parenting Center says:

“This is a remarkably clever and intuitive solution for families, and what makes it even more amazing is that it is FREE! So what are you waiting for?”

Wow! We are humbled and gratified by these rave reviews. Thanks to the testers who rated Cozi so highly, and thanks to the National Parenting Center for this great honor.

Most of all, thanks to all you Cozi families who use Cozi every day. Keep the feedback coming!

The Family Game of Twelvis

It wasn’t until Alice said, “OK, I have my tennis mitt” that I realized how messed-up my family’s game of tennis really is. If the girls ever play the real thing, they’re in for a shock. Baseball gloves simply aren’t allowed.

Let me back up, though.

Adam comes from one of those tennis-playing families. I think his parents even play in those snappy little white outfits at their country club. I’m not a tennis-whites kind of person. In fact, I only have one white shirt because of my spilling problem. And you can forget about me in a short white skirt. There’s not enough self-tanner in the world to make that attractive.

More to the point, though, I come from a family where only half of us got any sort of hand-eye coordination. I did take tennis lessons when I was a child, but was so bad at it that I could go entire 30- minute sessions without actually making any contact with the ball.

I do remember being told to shake hands with my tennis racquet. I shook hands like I was going in for a big job interview. Fat lot of good that did. I was horrible. Ten years later, in unrelated news, an ophthalmologist examined me and said, “Huh! You’re legally blind in one eye. You don’t use it at all for distance.”

It’s entirely possible that my lack of depth perception made hitting the ball a challenge (and don’t worry, I got it fixed in time to get my driver’s license). But I think the truth is, I’m not built for anything that requires coordination or grace.

Early on in my relationship with Adam, I tried playing tennis again, hoping that my robust corrective lenses would work miracles. Statistically speaking, I suppose they did. Two hits per hour is a big improvement. But I had to quit because it made my wrists hurt—or so Adam thinks.

Tennis is back in my life, though. The kids think it’s an awesome game, but probably because they have no idea how it’s actually supposed to be played. Lucy inherited my talent. She actually took a swing, missed, spun around and made a solid connection on her second attempt. It was like a cartoon. She couldn’t have been happier.

Alice appears to be taking after Adam’s side of the family, and once she cracks the 33-pound barrier, she might not tip over every time you put a racquet in her wee hands. She can actually swing and move a ball in generally the right direction, and if she thinks she’s going to miss, she makes good use of the mitt.

About this mitt. It’s a small, pink thing made out of pleather and purchased for $4.99 at the drugstore because the other glove Adam bought Alice was too big for her to close. Odd as it is, it is probably not the strangest thing about our family tennis games.

Nor is the way Adam and I struggle to avoid hitting our children, knocking easy lobs to each other over the heads of the girls, who like to run around the court at top speeds, brandishing their racquets. (“Look at me!” Alice says. “I AM YELLOW LIGHTNING!” “Look at me!” Lucy says, “I CAN FIT THE BALL IN MY MOUTH!”) 

No, the strangest thing about the way we play tennis is that we’ve included our dog in the game. Tennis purists would have a heart attack. But it does add a certain level of excitement.

She runs around after the girls, snatching balls out of the air, depositing them at our feet, dirty and dripping with saliva. Then they squelch and bounce off in unpredictable directions, while the kids whoop and holler and slash at the air with their racquets and baseball mitts.

It got really exciting the time a bee joined in the game and everyone started shrieking and hopping in order to avoid getting stung. Poor Rosie. She took one right in the rear end for the team.

This game we’re playing is tennis, but more. You could maybe call it eleven- or twelvis. And while it will never get us any points in a real match, I’m happy with the score nonetheless. I believe the tennis pros have the right name for it: love.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Back to School Celebration

It is almost time for the new school year to start. For many of you, it already has. This means brand-new shoes, sharpened pencils, fresh school supplies, and cool book covers. As a kid, I lived for this time of year. Call me crazy, but I was happier in school than with all of that summer time on my hands. So I figure why not celebrate this new beginning? If you are thinking along the same lines and want to celebrate this time of year with your kids, check out a few of the ideas and resources below.

Hand-deliver a fresh apple with a little tag attached that gives the details of the gathering. You could also put the party details on apple- or pencil-shaped cutouts that could be easily mailed.

Make the party room look like a mock classroom, with a chalkboard or white board, a desk, books, and school supplies. Use school colors and decorate with balloons, streamers, and a school banner. Apples on the party table would also be excellent.

Play word and mind games, and hold a gym class. Play bingo, Trivial Pursuit, 20 questions, word search, etc. For gym, play Simon Says, Red Rover, dodge ball, kickball, and Twister. Hold a relay race in which the kids get ready for school by filling their backpack and lunch bag, and then racing to one end and back.

For older kids, you may want to pop in a movie such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—a fun and easy activity for this age group.

For crafts, have the kids make bookmarks and/or book covers.

Food ideas are easy: pack school lunches. Ideas include small sandwiches, string cheese, a pack of goldfish crackers, an apple or a banana, and a little candy bar.

If you are going to hand out goodies, send them back to school in style. Fill paper gift bags with tissue, and add lots of school supplies like pencils, notebooks, erasers, locker mirrors, sticky pads, and gel pens.

--Lisa Kothari, Peppers and Pollywogs

Make an Arts and Crafts Box To Keep Kids Busy

Our almost-5-year-old isn’t very interested in toys anymore. She’ll play with them for a few minutes (and longer when she’s by herself in her room during our afternoon quiet time,) but they just aren’t holding her attention for very long. And she often gets bored in the mornings unless I have arts and crafts for her to use.

I'm a big believer in self-directed play, but the craft supplies have to be kept out of reach because of the age of our youngest, and I'm having a harder time coming up with creative combinations of supplies on the fly. While the girls love to color and can stay engaged for an hour or more with just a coloring book and crayons, it gets old when that’s all you do.

Art Boxes and Encouraging Free Art

The art boxes we had were filled with a variety of supplies, and the girls were not really focusing on any one thing. They ended up bored because they played with the same supplies every day.

This summer I decided to try something new. I prepared each art box with five different free-art activities. Each day, I simply open the box and let them choose one for the day, and everything they need is ready to go. Because our 21-month-old is determined to be a big girl but not quite able to handle the same crafts as the older girls, her box is packed with similar-yet-toddler-friendly activities.

What’s in the Art Box?

The art boxes in a typical week contain activities such as:

• Crayons

• Foam shapes and glue for gluing, as well as foam sheets to cut additional shapes

• Play-Doh, cookie cutters and a kid-friendly knife

• Crayola paint brush pens

• A second foam sheet and some make-your-own-monster stickers

Benefits of Preplanned Activities

Taking a little bit of time over the weekend to prepare these boxes has made it easier to pull out crafts throughout the week. As an added bonus, because I set aside time to put the boxes together, I have time to look through all of our craft boxes for other activity ideas and long-forgotten project supplies. They end up neater and more organized rather than torn apart from rooting through them when I’m searching desperately for an idea that will hold the girls attention without making a huge mess.

Mandi Ehman is mom to three (almost four!) spunky little girls. She believes that organizing only lasts if you do it your way – to fit your needs, your preferences and your lifestyle. She shares organizing and time management tips at Organizing Your Way and tips for simplifying and beautifying your home at Simple Nest.

The Parental Warning System

Remember when the federal government regularly issued color-coded terror-alert warnings? Remember how they toggled back and forth between the orange “high” and the red “severe” for years? It bugged me that the other colors never got their shot. And now, you never even hear about this system anymore. (Although we are currently in the yellow zone for “elevated” threat—don’t you feel better now?)

In case they’re going to be selling off the concept at a government-surplus store, or maybe a bake sale to raise money for health care, I’ve been thinking of a perfect use for those rainbow signs. We hardly have to make any changes--just swap in “parental irritation” for “terrorist attack” and we’re good to go.

I don’t want to make light of terrorism. Or bake sales. But it sure feels the security of my own homeland has a lot more to do with how well I can keep my patience with my kids when they’re asking me for the millionth time where their shoes are. 

More often than not, I lose my temper because I’m trying to do too many things at once. But sometimes, life with kids requires the simultaneous juggling of phone calls, boiling noodles and kittens. Orange and red days happen.

I once heard a mom say she’d never yelled at her child. Maybe that’s true. I wanted to ask her if she’d at least used her outside voice with him. And I thought about asking if she planned to donate her body to science after she was done with it, to see if there was something going on with her brain that made her immune to the stresses of child-rearing. Or maybe she just has really stiff vocal cords. I kept my mouth shut, though, because I didn’t want her to know she was so much better at this job than I am.

I lose my patience with my kids far more than I’d like to. When I was younger and more idealistic, I said I’d never yell, because my mom hollered at us a lot. It was necessary—we were on a swim team and she had to rouse the five of us out of bed at like 5:30 in the morning. One unforgettable morning, she came into my room and whispered, “It’s time to get up.” I thought she’d finally gotten the message that my teenage ears were sensitive, but no. She had laryngitis.

I feel horrible when I lose it. Especially because a wise friend once told me that our voices are the ones kids hear when they finally internalize their consciences. In my dreams, my children’s consciences will be me, whispering gently.

Reality, apparently, is a bit different.

Lucy’s table manners tend to bring out my loud voice. It was one thing seeing her with peanut butter on her forehead when she was a toddler. Now that she’s 9, this worries me. If she’s in a rush, she will stuff her cheeks to the Dizzy Gillespie point. And she’s never met a sleeve that she hasn’t turned into a napkin (even on velvet holiday dresses). At this rate, she’ll never be invited to dine with the Queen.

If this sounds petty to you, I invite you to come over to my house to get the stains out of her clothes. Also, Inventions Department? Please make me detachable napkin sleeves for all her shirts. The Sleevekin™: I’d buy it in bulk.

A friend and I went away last weekend. We both needed time get ourselves back in the green zone after a long, hot summer.

Adam kept me up to date on the kids’ activities, sending pictures and text messages. My favorite was his last. He’d taken the girls to the neighborhood bakery for donuts. They sat at a table on the sidewalk, enjoying the summer heat. Lucy spied a police officer and said, “Alice! Quick! Wipe your face! It’s the police!”

The best part? The officer heard and—perhaps predicting their future as delinquents—said, “I’ll be seeing you later, girls.” Then he went inside to get his own donut.

It seems Lucy has internalized my voice into her conscience, after all, and I apparently sound like a low-level street criminal on Law & Order. We have so drilled the concept of table manners into her that she believes there is, in fact, a prison for kids with frosting faces. At some point, she might even internalize the manners part.

Until then, I’ll keep working on my parental-alert warning system, and I’ll keep hoping for some green and blue days.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Share Your Family Journal via Email

Are you having the best summer ever? With lots of summer fun come lots of photos and great memories. Now if you add those photos and memories to your family journal, you can share your entries with family and friends easily via email.

You can share just one entry, or include a link to all your Cozi Family Journal entries. You can share your entry with just one person, or with a whole group. The process is simple, and the choice is yours!

Sending your journal by email offers a quick and simple way to share your special moments. If you just hosted a play date and took some fun photos of the kids climbing trees, you can add a photo to your Cozi Family Journal and send it easily to the other families in the play group.

Or if you just hosted a birthday party, you can send a speedy thank you note to all your party guests via email, complete with photos! Or if you spent a weekend away with another family, you can share your family journal entry just with them.

The friends or family you share with don’t even have to be signed up for Cozi to read your journal entry or see the picture. What’s more, you can easily import all the email addresses from your address book in Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, or dozens of other email providers.

The people you share with can even add positive feedback to your journal entries with a smile symbol. By adding a smile, your friends and family can let you know that they received your email and your journal entry made them smile.

It’s good to share! Enjoy!

Cut the Chaos: School Volunteering

Parenting contributor Lian Dolan imparts her hard-won wisdom.

Hi, my name is Lian and I’m a serial school volunteer. I can’t stop myself from signing my name when I see a blank space on a sheet of paper. If you are looking for a mom to run something, pick me, pick me. Look, I’m raising my hand! Book fairs, cookie-dough sales, auctions, historical recreations. (Yes, I have done square dance calling for the fourth-grade Pioneer Day despite the fact that I can’t differentiate a “do-si-do” from a “bow to your corner.”) I’ve been the Queen Bee in charge of events two years in the making, and I’ve been the Worker Bee, taking out the trash once the event is over. Here are my hard-earned tips for being a great school volunteer.

If You’re a Worker Bee
Do get involved. All the clichés about volunteer work are true — you meet great people, you connect with your community and you learn that giant pots of coffee take an hour to brew. Sign up for something, even if it’s only for a shift. We all have a skill to give back to the school.

Do the work. Sure, it’s delightful to chat with fellow moms you haven’t seen in a while, but if you are supposed to be staffing the face-painting booth, that means you’re supposed to be painting faces. Paint now, chat later. The chairperson has enough to oversee, she doesn’t want to have to keep prodding the volunteers to work.

Don’t second-guess. The decorations are lackluster and the food mediocre, but keep the criticisms to yourself. Chairing a school event is a thankless task, and everybody is a critic. Support Queen Bees with positive comments, not behind-the-scenes gossip.

If You’re the Queen Bee
Do it for the school, not your ego. Yes, it’s good of you to run the school auction, but you’re doing it to raise money for the school, not your social standing. The other volunteers are your friends and fellow parents, not your minions. The school and the kids come first. Respect the administration, teachers and traditions of the school.

Do delegate, and then let it go. I think the phrase is “control freak,” but that’s not supportive, is it? So I’ll just say that once you delegate a task, like centerpieces for the benefit, let the centerpiece mom do her job. Don’t double-check, triple-check or overrule her. Let the volunteers do what they volunteered to do. They want to be involved and respected.

Do make it fun. It’s a pizza lunch for the chess club, not the Middle East peace talks. Keep your perspective on the event.

Do follow up. Leave next year’s Queen Bee a notebook with all the lessons you’ve learned, helpful documents and lots of photos. And send thank-you notes to vendors, donors and outstanding volunteers. (They will remember and be touched.) Then take your Co-Queen Bee out for a pedicure, so the two of you can pamper your aching feet.

About the author: Lian Dolan is a writer, mother, Satellite Sister and creator of The Chaos Chronicles, a podcast, blog and website about modern motherhood.

MakingLifeBetter provides tips and smart strategies to help you feel good, look good, and get more out of life.

End-of-Summer Campout

A fun end-of-summer party idea is a campout!

This theme works especially well with children between the ages of 8 and 12. A fun overnight slumber party in late August is a perfect way to end summer.

Here are some fun activities to pass the time:

• Enjoy a proper cookout, and end the evening with s’mores.

• Have a water balloon fight.

• Tell scary ghost stories before going to bed. Have the storyteller hold a flashlight.

• Play flashlight tag.

• Pitch tents together.

• Use a telescope and gaze at the stars. Teach a fun astronomy lesson while you do this.

• Make tie-dyed T-shirts—a great take-home campout party favor.

• Blow bubbles and shine your flashlights on them. This produces cool effects everyone is sure to love.

• Make luminary bags with your guests to light the path to their tents.

• Take a long hike/walk through your neighborhood, or, even better, in a nearby wooded area or park.

• Have a sing-along around the campfire. Does anyone play guitar?

• Provide bug jars and catch fireflies.

Favors for this party can include flashlights, tie-dyed T-shirts, or little knapsacks filled with camping stuff (bug spray, glow-in-the-dark stickers, water guns, glow bracelets, little plastic animals that you would find in the woods, etc.). The ideas are endless.

As you can see, overnight camping parties are great fun. Kids love them, and you will too, given the variety of activities that can easily fill the night.

One cautionary note, and this is true of any sleepover: Make sure to get contact information from parents when they drop their kids off. Some kids are ready to spend the night away from home and others are not. In case someone wants to go home or gets sick, make sure to have the parents’ contact details on hand to make that important call.

Happy camping trails to you!

--Lisa Kothari, Peppers and Pollywogs

Fashion Victims

When I think back to some of the hair and clothing choices I made in high school, I have two choices: to laugh or to cry. Or I can laugh until I cry, which has happened more than once when I think about the perm I got that burned off huge chunks of my hair at the scalp. Please don't say the word "tuft" in my presence. I'm still sensitive.

Men my age don't really have this painful nostalgia problem unless they rocked swishy mullets, and even so, I don't think they look back on that as anything but evidence they once had super-heroic hair follicles. In short, fashion victims my age are far more likely to be girls. But you know what? The tide has turned.

I was walking behind a young man yesterday who appeared to be wearing the pants of an 8-year-old girl. His entire bottom—which I could easily see was wrapped in heather-gray underwear with a blue and white band—hung over the brim of his skinny, skinny pants.

It wasn't just a muffin top. It was a whole bakery top. Part of me wanted to see what was going on in the front, but the angels of my better nature really, really didn't. As he walked, his pants would slide down his legs, and every few steps he'd jerk them back up. He was one trombone sound effect away from being a walking cartoon.

Minutes later, I saw another boy about that age wearing skinny, skinny turquoise pants that also served as nothing more than a display shelf for his bottom.

What is up with this? Pretty much the first rule of pants is that they cover your front and back doors. You start with the fig leaf and work your way down. It's not that complicated.

When you add to this the ridiculousness of Zac Efron hairdo—dirty, dirty locks flat-ironed toward the cheeks like limp dandelion fringe—it becomes clear that the middle aged men of 2040 are setting themselves up for midlife crises of mythological proportions. Forget convertibles and younger women. These men will buy flying cars and date embryos.

And while I laugh at this, I also recognize that this laughter comes from within the generous confines of my very first pair of mom jeans. Apparently, the apocalypse is upon me, and it came wearing sensible shoes.

I recently bought this pair of high-waisted jeans because I got sick of having to use the buddy system to sit.

"Cover me!" I'd say to a friend so that no one behind me was getting peek at the full moon in broad daylight.

I found out about my pants through an online mom's group. Someone asked about jeans that don't reveal our middle-aged-mom mysteries and I wrote down the recommended brand. And it wasn't just a recommended brand, but one designed for Target by a woman who lives in my very neighborhood. You know you're getting old when pants from Target designed by someone who shops at the same drugstore sounds far more exciting than $300 "premium" denim.

My mom jeans are so comfortable. I can bend and pick stuff up without having to use one free hand to hold my pants in place. I no longer feel an unwelcome breeze on my lower back when I'm sitting in a chair. It's a thing of great joy.

Twenty years from now, I might look back on pictures of me in my mom jeans and wince in much the same way I do when I watch my future son-in-law try to parallel park his flying car.

I'm guessing, though, that any regret I feel won't be over how I look in my high-waisted pants, but rather, because it took me far too long to appreciate the even greater comfort of an elastic waistband.

--Martha Brockenbrough