Back to School Tips: The 5+ Name Labels Pack from Stuck on You

Blogger Lori McGrath recently reviewed some name labels from Stuck on You in the quest to find the best Value Pack to help moms with organization. 

I recently discovered a fantastic labelling system by Stuck on You that is perfect for Back to School.

Whether your child is going to daycare, preschool, kindergarten or grade school, you need all kinds of supplies – a backpack, water bottle, lunch kit, shoes, sweaters, boots, jackets and so on. And you need to label all these items so you don’t lose them in a classroom full of other people’s things!

I recently tested out a personalized Stuck on You 5+ Pack Canada (Stuck on You 5+ Pack USA) which comes with all kinds of labels and tags, perfect for kindergarten or school.

The 5+ Value Pack includes:

• iron on labels for clothes
• name labels which can be used on anything
• mini labels which are perfect for school supplies and/or pencils
• shoe dots (these are my son’s favourite)
• a personalized bag tag for your child’s backpack

Your child’s name is pre-printed on all the labels and you get to choose from a variety of cool colours, designs and fonts as you complete your online order. My son loves trucks and construction sites so I choose a digger design for his labels but there are tons of choices!

I love the set I ordered for my son, and would highly recommend this labeling system to my mom friends. At $49.95, it is a bit pricey but if you look on the Stuck on You Canada website or the Stuck on You USA website, there are a variety of great personalized labels and gifts to choose from for any budget!

Lori McGrath is a mama, blogger and communications consultant. She loves reading, yoga, scrapbooking and seafood and is learning to be more domestic everyday.  Catch up with Lori on her award winning blog Half Baked Banana Bread where she dishes on life, love and motherhood or on Twitter @thewritemama.

Top Tips from the Winner of the 2012 Organized Mom Awards

Congratulations to Kathryn Lavallee from all of us here at the Organized Mom Awards. We have learned so much over the last 6 weeks thanks to all of the industrious and inventive tips that have been share by the entrants in the Organized Mom Awards.

Here are the top three organizational tips that Kathryn shared as part of her winning entry:

1) Get school-ready before bed! I always make sure that my son’s library books are in his backpack, his homework is complete and the ingredients for his lunch are on the counter ready to be packed up before bed.

2) It’s not a purse, it’s an arsenal! I carry everything from wet-wipes to safety pins to a spare pair of pants for my toddler to a little activity set in my purse. No matter what emergency arrives, you’ll be ready if you stock up your purse for emergencies.

3) Always have a backup plan! I decided to make a very ambitious cake for my son’s sixth birthday. But I was ready with a backup cake just in case! And while the original plan was for an outdoor party, I had alternative activities in case of rain. Making sure you’re always ready with an alternative can keep you on track and organized even when things go wrong!

Thanks so much for sharing your  awesome tips, Kathryn. I love the ‘always have a back up plan’ tip! Especially as my soon to be 9 year old daughter has asked for the two-tiered ‘Dreamland Castle’ for her birthday cake next weekend. Let’s just say I will have an ice cream cake in the freezer just in case!

Congratulations Kathryn from the sponsors of the Organized Mom Awards, Stuck on You. We look forward to awarding you with $1000 and we are proud to donate $1000 to your chosen charity, the Canadian Food Bank.

Top 3 Tips – Laundry, Dinner and Mornings!

Lianne is a Canadian mother of four, entrepreneur and author of Lianne’s Quick Guide – for the busy woman. She lives & works just outside of Amsterdam and can usually be found biking around on her bicycle built for six.

Her first title is called Babies 0-6 months and can be purchased directly from her website, Lianne’s Quick Guide.

You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter. You can also find her writing for Organized Mom Awards supporters, Oh Baby! Magazine. For now, she is here with us, sharing her top tips for being an organized mom…

I am not a homemaker. In fact, when my now-husband came to my apartment after we’d met I had all of a block of cheese, some ginger and some wine in my fridge.  What else does a girl need right?  I must have done laundry but I have no recollection of it. And mornings, well let’s just say that I’m more of a night person.

Fast forward to today. I have 4 kids aged 4,5,7,8 and my old habits are still getting in the way. Don’t get me wrong, I do cook now and do the laundry, they are just not exactly my favorite things.

This is my way of organizing the 3 things I don’t like doing…

1.      Laundry

I do the laundry about every 7-10 days. The catch here is having enough underpants for your kids (and yourself…) for this amount of days.   I run the machine all day long, which is possible as I work from home.  I wash everything in cold, occasionally spraying some extra cleaning stuff on a stain that I happened to notice as I dump the laundry into the machine.  That night or the next, I pour myself a big glass of wine, put on a pre-taped episode of Mad Men and fold. Fold, fold, fold.  In this way it almost becomes meditative. Oh and I don’t buy anything white or that needs ironing and my husband irons his own shirts.

2.      Dinner

I cooked when I was a kid but sometime between leaving for University (meal-plan) and having kids, I just stopped.  I mean I ate, made salads, bought bread and cheese but just didn’t cook actual meals.  With 4 kids that had to change.  Three nights a week I have fixed diners. Tuesdays are wraps and Thursdays are pasta & Fridays are tortillas. I fill in the other days with a list of meals that I have learned to make and I try to stretch each meal into 2.  I have, in the past, made a monthly calendar with meals written down so that I only need to shop for everything once a week and to ensure a small variation for my husband. In fact, I need to get back to that system after the summer. The great thing about it was that I didn’t have to think about what to make for diner every night, I just checked out my calendar plan.

3.      Mornings

To start, I make the lunches for the kids the night before, seeing I’m a night person and all.  I buy fresh bakery bread once a week and freeze it.  I use the frozen bread, which thaws nicely into fresh and chewy sandwiches in no time and I don’t have to worry about having fresh bread in the house.  In the morning, my husband and I (both of us like to sleep until the very last minute), work like a well-oiled machine.  The alarm goes off at 7am, we get up at 7:30am. He wakes up the kids while I get dressed (showers are overrated!), I get the kids moving and head down to start breakfast which has already been put on the table (minus the milk) the night before.  While husband gets the cereal going, I am brushing the girls hair and then make my own breakfast.  While I’m finishing breakfast, my husband brushes teeth.  At 8:15 we are all ready to leave.  The extra half hour this gives me in the morning is exactly what I need.

These aren’t power tips but they do make my life easier.  I don’t feel like I’m doing laundry all of the time, meals are relatively easy to manage and the 30 min win in the morning helps my inner night person deal a tiny bit better.

What tips can you share that help you feel like an organized mom?

Tips for Sorting Kids’ Clothes for Back to School

Julie Campbell is the Owner of Small Concepts, a mom of two children and a grandmother of two more. Small Concepts is a website and blog born of a love for children and an obsession for tiny tot style, modern fashion, cool styles and great quality.  It is an awesome online resource for parents  in everything for little ones from kid’s apparel to nursery furniture, toys to maternity and more.

We figured Julie would know a thing or two about what it takes to be an organized mom. Here are her top tips for sorting through kids’ clothes as you prepare for heading back to school :

In my day, we all started school after Labor Day, these days some children are starting back to school this week – in July!  Wow!  Back to School clothes shopping can be a challenge with the different start times.  Some of you still need Summer clothing instead of Fall.  Many of the designers are aware of the needs.  When I started buying Fall in January, I was surprised to see the short sleeves, shorts, sleeveless dresses in the first deliveries – Designers do their research.  Small Concept will be prepared for all of the climates across the USA.  Hartstrings and Kitestrings have begun to arrive along with Tea Collection.  Wes and Willy have great graphic tees for boys for Fall.  Alpha Industries, Biscotti, Kate Mack, Appaman, Wonderboy and Stun will be arriving soon.

Keeping your child organized for fall is an important task for any Mom.  Some of you have the independent child that wants to choose their wardrobe; others of you have those that have interest somewhere other than their wardrobe.  Go through the closest with your child and make three stacks – Keep, Donate, and Consign.  Look for a great charity for children to donate clothing.  Also look for consignment sales or stores to consign some of those pieces and make money back to purchase new clothing.  For the “Keep” stack, organize by color and type before hanging in the closet or folding for the drawers.  This will help your child pick matching outfits.  I would recommend that the outfit be chosen the night before to take one task out of those busy mornings.  Keep this project light and happy by taking snack breaks and making games out of the color/type organizing.  Happy organizing, Moms!

5 Breastfeeding Tips

Oh Baby! Magazine are proud supporters of the Organized Mom Awards. This magazine is an awesome resource for pregnant women and new moms with great articles, advice and well-founded research. We asked a few of their writers if they would share some of the tips that have helped them to feel like an organized mom…

Breastfeeding is something women have been doing for centuries but it isn‘t always easy. I was very nervous about breastfeeding because everyone I knew who had kids bottle fed their kids either by choice or because breastfeeding didn’t work for them. I didn’t have anyone to turn to if I needed advice.

The following tips are some of the things that make breastfeeding work for me. I breastfed my daughter for 13 months and I am currently breastfeeding my 7 month old. I hope these tips will help make breastfeeding an enjoyable experience for you as it is for me.

1.      Find a comfortable place to breastfeed. 

Breastfeeding can last up to 40 minutes (sometimes longer if you have a big eater like my boy) so you want to pick a place that won’t be hard on your back. You may have to try a few different areas that will work well for you both. I liked sitting on my recliner so I was comfortable and I could watch TV while the baby slept and fed. Keep the phone nearby (it will ring as soon as you and baby are comfortable – it’s Murphy’s Law) and get yourself a drink for those extra-long feeds.

2.      Get a good breastfeeding pillow.

It will help with holding your baby in place so your arms won’t tire. It will also help to keep baby in a comfortable position.

3.      Latching is always an issue for new moms to get used to.

If latching on hurts, they are not on properly. Break the suction – by inserting your little finger between your baby’s gums and your nipple – and try again.

4.      Look for breastfeeding clinics in your area that will offer support when needed.

La Leche League offers support groups in many areas. If it wasn’t for the moms in these support groups, I don’t know that I would’ve lasted as long as I did. Remember that you are not alone and if you want help, it is out there.

5.      Have an older child that demands your attention as soon as you sit down to feed the baby?

Keep a few books nearby so you can read together. This way you still have some one on one time with them and they won’t feel like the baby is monopolizing all your time.

Finally patience is a virtue. I realize that breastfeeding is not for everyone but if you choose to, it can and will be the most wonderful bonding experience.

Share your top tips for breastfeeding with success.