My Greatest App for Staying Organised

This year has been a great one for me. I have made several strides in my personal and professional life.  I graduated with my Masters!! Whoop, whoop!!

I also decided to embrace tech to see if it could help organise my very busy life.  I feel like I’m running 3 concurrent lives! Anyone can tell you that any system you get is only as good as the information you feed it and honestly, I would much rather be feeding my kids, some guests or even the dog than feed data into a computer or some app on my phone. Of course, my attempt to use tech to organise me failed.

Then I thought to marry old school and new school and put sticky notes on my screen (not the physical ones), which I did and I felt really good for having organised my stickies into subjects and listing my to do’s.  9 sticky notes later, I felt pretty accomplished. Only thing however, was that the app does not have the ability to strike through or tick, so I decided to put an asterisk (*) at the beginning of every task I completed.  However, an asterisk usually denotes urgency so every time I look at my stickies, I have all these ‘urgent’ matters staring at me. Also, sometimes a task changes slightly and there is no way to really show this on the sticky! Again, my system failed (and I hated that this obscures my painstakingly chosen background).

Then I had a conversation with a friend and after trying to unravel the mess of thoughts in my mind, it was clear that I needed something to off load my thoughts. Somewhere, I could easily add thoughts, refine thoughts and cross of the items that are done or have become redundant.  Where oh where could I get an app like that?

You got it! Who needs an app? I just need to dust off my trusted whiteboard and put it back to use.

Just because technology has come up with some great apps does not mean I must be tied to them, especially when they don’t work for me.  Just because hoverboards have been invented (and oh yes aren’t they cool!) doesn’t mean we all have to hop onto one and zip around the malls. It is OK to walk. 

It is OK to plan my life on a whiteboard.

Looking forward to colour coding, underlining, crossing out, drawing squigglies, circling stuff, creating sub-groups ….

Oh the glee!!

My Dog thinks I'm an Animal

Bringing up kids is such an adventure. 

We have a simple rule in our house: no wasting food. To support this, I allow my children to decide their portions. Thus no one can claim to have been served too much food. Consequently, whatever gets into your plate must be eaten to the end.

Kids are just little  adults and they too try to get away with as much as they can (I wonder who learnt it from whom?) 

When githeri hits the table, the stunts increase. Recently my little one serves then decides after 2 spoons that she is full, completely disregarding the bowl of githeri in front of her. So, diligent parent that I am, I put my foot down and demand a clean plate. After all, she is the one who dictated the quantity.

What follows is a game of tug and war. I am used to it and always win. The trick is not to show weakness in the face of the tears and not to laugh at the oh so laughable excuses that tend to follow. This time however, there was a twist ... the dog!

When little girl started crying, the dog started crying too, moving to her side as if to protect her, but there was nothing to protect her from. So she (the dog) comes to me and starts whining as if to say 'stop harassing the child' and then it hit me ... 

My dog thinks I am an animal!!