It’s no secret that this is one busy TR family. We’ve always had lot going on from Day 1. Doctor’s appointments, playdates, work events, club meetings, vacation days… it’s a lot to keep track of for any family.
We’ve used a number of different schemes to help keep everyone on track.
For a long time we had a standard bank wall calendar hanging in the kitchen. And we’d scrawl notes on there as we remembered upcoming events. And we’d try to check the wall each morning. As events got cancelled and rescheduled, the calendar quickly became an overwhelmed scribble.
We switched to a larger “Family” calendar we picked up in a bookstore. It featured bigger notation spaces and cute stickers to help serve as reminders. But as our family grew, and activities accumulated, this family calendar also became an over-worked mess.
There was a period where TRMom would print out pages of Microsoft calendar months from her office. So TRMom and TRDad would email and call each other to update the computer calendar, and TRMom would print out a new version weekly. We’d tape it to the wall and write in additions for the next week’s printing. Better, but not great.
We continued to struggle with finding methods to keep appointments up-to-date, how to remember to look at them, and still have a serviceable method of figuring out what was going on in our active little group.
And then we got smart phones.
It took us a good minute to work out the kinks, but we soon found we could easily add or remove calendar items from our shared digital calendars with ease. And by setting your personal preferences, you can receive reminder messages about all, or some of your events. Now it is very easy for us to keep track of this crazy busy clan.
Our good friend Siri can even add calendar events for us, making this the easiest system we’ve used to date. And you can have your family’s Facebook events automatically populate your digital calendar as well.
By setting up multiple color coded calendars, you can even make calendars that show your kiddos only the events or reminders that pertain to them, and leave the “Send In Car Payment” notes out of their line of vision.
We are happy to be able to have synched calendars at a moment’s notice. It helps keep us all on the same page and limits the surprises. We highly recommend that if available, you consider utilizing these digital calendars for your family.