And the Winners Are…

Motivated Moms chore planner: KellyJ

Bizzi2Go: Activities Coordinator

Congratulations, ladies. Act. Coord., email me your address and I’ll get your planner in the mail ASAP. Kelly, drop me a note and I’l forward your info to the MM folks. Be sure to check out the different versions and decide which one you want.

To all of you, thanks for playing. Now go be organized!

Planner Review: Bizzi2Go

Next up: the Bizzi2Go. Click below to read the review and enter a drawing for a Bizzi2Go planner.

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Planner Review: Motivated Moms Chore Planner

FamilyTimeMine winners, your planners are (finally) on their way. I know they didn’t make it time for January 1st, but you should have them by Thursday at the latest.

I have two more planners to give away. I think you’ll be very excited by this first one: the Motivated Moms Chore Planner. I love this thing. (Kathryn wrote about it here.) It’s a download and you print it out yourself. Even though I’m already quite happy with my daily planner, I like the idea of a daily chore planner to help me keep on track in my beautification efforts.

There are several versions of the Motivated Moms planner (click here to see them all). The variable options have to do with size (you can choose between 8 1/2 x 11" and 5.5"x8.5") and configuration (weekly or daily). For each size/layout combination, there is an option to include a Bible reading schedule as well.

The version I have is the full size (8 1/2" x 11") weekly planner. The layout is clean and simple: there are no fancy graphics here. Down the left side of the page runs a column with checkboxes for daily chores: make beds, unload dishwasher, and so forth; and there are blanks for adding your own daily chores as well. These are the things you do every day, and each chore has seven little checkboxes below it.

The right side of the page is for chores specific to each day. Every day of the week (it’s a Sunday through Saturday week, which I prefer) has a list of six or seven tasks to complete that day. Each task is finite and simple: clean out purse, change handtowels in bathrooms, dust office. Through the course of a week, month, year, you rotate through all the household tasks that should ideally happen on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis.

The halfsized version of the weekly planner is exactly the same except it prints out with two weekly pages on each sheet of 8 1/2" x 11" paper. You can cut these apart and put them into a Franklin Covey-style planner, or you can put them in your own notebook. The full-sized weekly planner is 55 pages total: cover, 53 weekly chore pages, and a reproducible 2-week menu planning page. The half-sized version prints out in 28 pages.

You can order each of these with or without the Bible schedule.

The daily planner comes in the same sizes, but instead of a week (or two weeks) per printed page, it’s a day (or two days) per printed page. In addition to the daily chore checklists, each day has a space for menu-planning and a section for recording appointments.

There are sample pages at the website. Each version costs an affordable $8 to download. I have printed mine out, hole-punched it, and put it in one of my lovely Small Meadow Press "Pigeonhole" binders. It’s so pretty I just like to see it sitting on the end table! But to
keep on track with the chores, what I’m going to try is hanging each week’s page on the refrigerator. There are so many little household tasks that never seem to occur to me, and I like the idea of the mental nudge every time I go to the fridge in search of chocolate. Gosh, if I do one chore every time I sneak a chocolate chip, how clean and shiny will my house be!

(I’ll let you know how it goes.)

Here’s the fun part: the nice folks at Motivated Moms have offered one of their planners for a giveaway here. If you’d like to enter, leave a comment on this post. No need to decide now which version you want—the winner will have her pick after the drawing. Let’s see, today is Tuesday…why don’t I do the drawing on Friday, January 4th, at noon Pacific time. That will give the winner the weekend to catch up on this week’s chores.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go change my handtowels and declutter my purse.

MomAgenda
Catholic Woman’s Daily Planner
Small Meadow Press — Circle of Days
BusyBodyBook

Day Planners for Moms: FamilyTimeMine (and a Double Giveaway)

When I started yakking about my favorite day planners over at Lilting House a long while back, I had no idea what I was starting. Look at this:

That’s just this week’s searches, and only the top chunk of the list. I let
go of the Grab button too soon and didn’t feel like redoing it.

It seems I’m not the only one with a planner obsession.

I also learned that if you review them, they will come. I wound up with more planners than you could shake a Bic at. (Har.)

Here’s one with lots to like about it: the FamilyTime.Mine day planner. The company sent me two sizes to look at: a purse-sized 5 1/2" x 8" model, and an 8 1/2" x 11" model. (I’ll be giving them away at the end of this post.) Both are spiral bound, which I’ve decided is my preference for a planner. I really need to be able to fold back the cover for easy writing. The front and back covers are sturdy plastic, also a plus. I like the colorful confetti design on the little one. Actually, they’re both quite festive. The colors on the larger one (this is the "Collage" pattern) are brighter than they appear in this image.

Okay, these images are not to scale. The one on the left, Collage, is the 8 1/2 x 11" model. There are other cover designs available, too.

Enough about the outside! Open them up, and the first two pages are a heavy card stock, folded so there’s a large flap on the left-hand side. I have the August 2007-Dec. 2008 versions, so the flaps read "Fall 2007" and "Winter 2007." I assume the 2008 version has front flaps for Winter and Spring. Open the flap and you have a fold-out grid for writing out your weekly master schedule. In the back of the planner are two more of these folded card-stock pages, with two more seasons’ worth of master schedule grids. This is a pretty nifty feature, I must say. The flaps do add a little bulk to the planner, but these are skinny planners compared to other brands on the market, so even with the flaps they are not unwieldy at all.

(Click image to enlarge.) The weekly schedule on the left is the folded-over part of the flap.

Apart from these master schedule pages, the paper is thin. I haven’t pen-tested these but I’m guessing there’s bound to be some bleed-through. I’m a felt-tip pen kind of girl (or better yet, fountain pens), so thin paper makes me crazy. This is the only major strike against the FamilyTimeMine, but for me it’s a biggie.

After some instructional and promo pages (which you could tear out), there’s a page for personal info, emergency numbers, and holiday dates. On the other side of that begin the monthly and weekly calendar spreads. This planner has the monthly spreads inserted before each month’s set of weekly pages (as opposed to the MomAgenda which has all the monthly spreads together up front, a feature I am wildly fond of).

The monthly spreads are nice and clean, with big clear boxes. (REALLY big, in the 8 1/2 x 11" version.)

The weekly pages are a page per week (not a spread per week).

You’ll note it’s a Monday-through-Sunday week.

The gray columns on the side of each page are a perforated list area. You can tear these off or fold them over. That’s a neat feature, although I’m not crazy about the fact that every page is perforated (including the monthly calendar grids—not the card-stock flap pages, of course). Call me picky, but I don’t like the perforation running down the line between Sunday and Monday on the monthly calendar.

It’s a clean, functional format, though, with lots of writing space and little visual clutter. There are teeny tiny quotes at the bottom of each weekly grid.

Back-of-the-book extra pages include a babysitter info page, a kind of personal yellow pages space, some pages for recording phone numbers & email addresses, and two blank lined pages for notes.

Behind the two final flappy card-stock master schedule pages is a page of FlyLadyesque stickers for birthdays, bills, holidays, vacation, Important! events, ball games, and other events for which you might enjoy a colorful reminder. The back cover (that nice sturdy plastic again) has a very nice side pocket for tucking stuff into. I think I would prefer a bottom pocket, but this is still quite a nice feature.

Checking around, I see prices ranging from $10.15 (for the smaller size, at Amazon) to $16.99 (for the larger size, at Calendars.com). (The larger size seems to be about $13 at Amazon.)

Giveaway time! Leave a comment on this post and I’ll enter you in a drawing for one of these two planners. I’m giving them both away, so if you have a size preference, include that in your comment. The first winner I draw will get to pick which size he or she gets. I’ll hold the drawing on Monday, December 17, for a sort of hobbity reason. That ought to give me time to mail these to the winners before New Year’s. (But remember, these are the August 2007-December 2008 models, so you’ll probably want to tear out a bunch of pages in the front.)

Next up: the Bizzimom planner.

Other planners reviewed at Lilting House (this is the index page; scroll down to find the review you want):

MomAgenda
Catholic Woman’s Daily Planner
BusyBodyBook
Mom’s Daily Planner
A Circle of Days (Small Meadow Press)   

The Promised Planner Post

Updated with more information!

I know, I know! It’s practically September! I would assume you’ve all bought your planners already, except every day I’m getting zillions of hits for "planner for moms"-related phrases. Some of you out there are still shopping.

Catholic Woman’s Daily Planner

The ever-popular Catholic Woman’s Daily Planner by Family-Centered Press is in fact so popular this year that the small size, the one I like best, is already sold out. In the school-year format, that is. The 2008 Jan-Dec calendar is still available in both sizes. The school-year version is only available in the 8 1/2 x 11" three-hole-punched size. If you use a binder for your planner or home management book, you’ll definitely want to take a look at Michele Quigley’s lovely pages.

Two page weekly spread with daily mass readings, all feast days & solemnities plus a daily rosary mystery reminder. Two page monthly spread with the Holy Father’s prayer intentions and all major feasts & holidays. Daily prayers, prayer journal, address book, web log & year-at-a-glance.

All styles have the full color cover page and include 13 plastic permanent stick-on tabs (12 printed months -1 blank).

You can also order menu-planning pages and lesson-planning pages. I’ve used this planner (the small spiral-bound version) for two years and I really love it. I did wind up wishing I hadn’t gone for the extra lesson-planning pages. I liked the menu pages very much, but I just don’t have a need for lesson-planning pages. What planning I do happens right here, in blogland. I use a planner for scheduling our bajillion doctor appointments and for recording—after the fact—what we did, read, ate, saw. "Planner" is probably not the right word for my purposes—"chronicle" would be more accurate.

Michele’s planner made a lovely chronicle. And I love having the saints’ feast days printed on every day.

Here’s my glowing review of last year’s Catholic Woman’s Daily Planner.

Price:
8 1/2 x 11" edition, $24.99.
With menu planning pages, $28.98.
With lesson-planning pages, $29.48.
With both menu and lesson pages, $33.47.

Also available: a men’s version. The Family-Centered Student Planner is already sold out for this year.

Oh—and I love Michele’s lovely nature journals, only $5 each!

MomAgenda

Now, you may recall from last year that I wound up with both the Catholic Woman’s planner and the deliciously pretty MomAgenda. The MomAgenda’s soft pastel pages and satin ribbon still make me swoon. And I still think the format, with sections for mom and up to four kids on each weekly spread, is brilliant. You can read what I wrote last year if you want to know more about it. 

What I wound up not liking, and one of the reasons the Catholic Woman’s planner won out in the end, was the binding. In the beginning I actually thought the sewn binding with its sturdy-yet-attractive shantung cover would be a big mark in this planner’s favor, especially with the ribbon sewn in to mark your place. I am a sucker for ribbons.

But I discovered I really, really have to have a spiral-bound planner. I need to be able to fold the cover back; I need small and wieldy. You know, as opposed to big and unwieldy.

Now that’s just my preference. The 7-hole-punched Franklin Covey-style
planners in nice leather binders have never worked for me either. They
wooed me with their nifty pockets (I got a used one on eBay a few years
ago), but you can’t fold them back like a spiral.

Well, I’m in luck. I may have been too late to snag the small-sized spiral bound Catholic Woman’s Daily Planner, but MomAgenda has a spiral-bound version, too. They sell it alone for $19.95, or in a perfectly gorgeous (and fearfully expensive) leather binder.

The spiral (sold as a "refill") has a sturdy plastic cover, metal
(not plastic) rings, and those same pretty, pretty blue calendar pages
with the special kids-and-mom format. In the back are also some
planning pages (green) and note pages (purple). The month-at-a-glance
spreads are all together in the front of the planner, which I love,
instead of spread out through the year in front of each month’s weekly
pages.

This is an August 2007 through December 2008 calendar. So is the bound version, which they call the "desktop" model.

Here’s a look at that clever layout (click to enlarge):

There are quotes at the top of the weekly pages, and last year one
or two of the quotations were not the sort of thing you’d want your
tender young readers to grab hold of. MomAgenda creator Nina Restieri
responded to customers’ complaints with concern, and my guess is that
this year the quotes were chosen a bit more carefully. If you can’t
leave your planner out on the counter all day, what good is it?

Price:
Spiral-bound planner, $19.95.
Spiral-bound planner in leather binder with pockets, address book: $119.50
Desktop planner with sewn binding: $42.

The BusyBodyBook

I reviewed The BusyBodyBook last year (here’s my post,
which was quite detailed), and this year’s version is similar, with
some improvements. Like the MomAgenda, the BusyBodyBook provides a
weekly grid with space for five separate people. It’s a totally
different layout from the MomAgenda, though—the people columns are
vertical and the days of the week are horizontal. Like this:

The left-hand pages are for notes and lists, and the weekly grid is on the right.

I quite like the light brown shading on the weekly grids (though not
nearly as much as I like those blue MomAgenda pages), but this year’s
covers don’t do much for me.

Actually, the striped one isn’t bad; it’s just that my taste tends to run more to vintage botanicals. Or anything Lesley Austin makes.

Last year I complained about the photos that decorated the bottoms
of the left-hand pages, and what do you know? This year they’re gone:
big improvement.

There are six-month-at-a-glance pages up front, covering July 2007
through December 2008. I like the idea of seeing six months at a
glance, but of course in putting that many months on a spread, the
grids must be much smaller, and these are probably too small for my
purposes. The month-at-a-glance part of my planner is my most-used
part. The rest is for notes and jottings. It’s that monthly calendar
that keeps all my balls in the air.

In the back are some extras, including perforated to-do lists (nice
touch!), note pages, address pages, and a pocket. (There’s a front
pocket too.)

What strikes me about this planner is that it would work really well
for scheduling lessons and activities for multiple kids. I like its 7 x
10" trim size and spiral binding. The cover is heavy card stock. The
planner covers August 2007 through September 2008. (There are 2008
calendar-year versions available as well, with fun, funky covers.)

Price: $16.95.

BusyBodyBook also sells a 7-column magnetic Fridge Grid Pad. You write the names of each family member across the top and their activities through the week. Here’s a peek:

More planner posts:

Small Meadow Press: A Circle of Days
The Mom’s Daily Planner
Reader suggestions
More reader comments

Elsewhere on the web:

How Ann uses planners
Kim’s home management binder
Stef on the Levenger Circa paper/digital system
Free planning resources at Donna Young
Jen on her Teacher Plan Book

If you’ve got a planner post, send me the link!

Mom Planner Reviews, Season 2: Your Opinions

Last summer’s series on day planners for moms continues to be one of my highest search-engine traffic draws. I’m gearing up for another set of reviews, but in the meantime (and more importantly), I’d like your input. My wonderful (and dearly missed) Virginia pal, Sarah of Herding Turtles, suggested I ask my readers the following question:

Which planner did you wind up using this past year, and—here’s the pertinent question—are you still using it?

Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Last year’s planner reviews:
MomAgenda
Catholic Woman’s Daily Planner
Small Meadow Press — Circle of Days
The BusyBodyBook
The Mom’s Daily Planner
Reader Suggestions