Money Saving Mom®

Guest post by Lisa at Warrior Mama

I’m a mom of two special needs kids. I make all of my kids’ foods from scratch to avoid their combined 35 food allergies and sensitivities. I also manage multiple specialists, food supplements, medications and education IEP’s.

Here are a few things I do to make my days run more smoothly:

Take time to write down a master checklist for your day.

Place the checklist in a plastic protector to be reused. Managing special food diets, supplements, medicines and therapy appointments is overwhelming! A checklist frees your mind to take care of your family knowing you are not going to forget the details.

Designate a box for completed school papers.

Your school papers box will do double duty. Kids with learning disabilities sometimes need to revisit old worksheets to remember how they learned a school skill. These papers will also help give you concrete examples of what skills your child still needs help with to take when you go to their IEP meeting.

Keep all your supplements and medicines in one location.

Our kitchen has often looked like a small pharmacy and health food store! Go ahead, I give you permission, devote one whole shelf or cabinet to your child’s needs. And don’t get rid of those old baby food carousels; they are perfect to hold pill bottles.

Keep good tax records.

Children with special needs qualify for additional tax benefits. Keep all your receipts from supplements, doctor’s visits, special schools, foods bought for food allergies and the mileage for each of those events. Just like the school papers, just keep them in a box so you have them if you need them at tax time.

Color-code your calendar.

I put all our chiropractor and NAET appointments in green on my calendar. They are easy to find when I am planning my week so I don’t miss any appointments. It also makes it easier to go back and make a mileage list for taxes.

Buy extra medicine spoons.

I have at least 20 plastic medicine spoons. I keep them in the kid’s bathroom and the kitchen. What items do you always run out of? Parenting special needs kids is stressful. Anything you can streamline or duplicate may make your day run more smoothly.

Keep a diary.

Keep a small notebook to record daily events. Special needs children can be affected by foods and medical changes. I found that jotting down what my kids ate, when we changed supplements or medicine dosages and unusual behaviors overtime helped us make better decisions in managing our children’s needs.

Lisa is a Cincinnati mom who has struggled the last 10 years to give her kids the best education, food and treatments money can buy. Raising special needs kids is taxing emotionally, relationally, financially and physically. Her dream is to break down the walls isolating special needs families and providing them with information to help them achieve their goals. Lisa blogs at Warrior Mama.

Guest post by Jennifer from I Heart Organizing

1. Invest in a Great Daily Planner

My daily planner is my lifeline. It goes with me everywhere I go.

Planners have been around forever, but they are really the most genius way to keep it all together. Every paper that comes home from school with a date on it, instantly gets written in the planner.

What’s for lunch on Wednesday? It’s in the planner. What should I blog about on Monday? Oh yes, also in the planner. What night is garbage night? Family night? It’s all written down in the planner, and color-coded by category (i.e. blog post, meal plan, school event, etc.) When the planner is not physically attached to me in some way, it’s sitting on our counter to be viewed by anyone in the family.

If budgets are tight, with a little creative thinking, a spiral notebook could be transformed for anyone looking to adopt this idea.

2. Make Family Night a Priority

Family Night gets scheduled in each week at our house, just like an appointment.

Family comes first and with the hustle and bustle of all things entertainment, family functions, school activities and sporting events, important family bonding can quickly become obsolete. Making sure to pen it in each week and learning to say, “No” to other obligations that may come up on the same night, is extremely important to us spending quality time together on a weekly basis.

3. Solve the Schedule Equation

On top of tossing all of our important schedules and appointments into the planner, we quickly found that it was still easy for us to get lost in our nightly routine. A quick video game or blog post writeup could simply turn into hours of lost time.

Trying to juggle homework, making dinner, baths, one-on-one time, story time and blogging was definitely a lot to manage without any type of direction. I knew I had to figure it all out, in order to completely maximize our evenings together (not to mention our super speedy wake-up-and-get-on-the-bus mornings!)

Something I found incredibly easy to do, was to break out the day in half-hour increments and plan out a “typical” day in our life.

Just looking at all the times slots paired up with all the things that I was dreaming of accomplishing in any given day was great for ensuring we get time to do all the things that matter, from time with our little ones to personal time on our hobbies or interests. I popped my visual breakdown right on the side of the fridge, because it’s great to have a time management reference point if I ever feel like we are getting a little lost.

I was beyond surprised that when the day was broken out there was so much time in the day that I then instantly wondered how I had been wasting it away in the past! Of course not every day is laid out perfectly as there is such a thing called life, but having a plan for our days has definitely proven to keep our daily goals in check and ease in our time management prioritization.

4. Create a Meal Plan

A very obvious time saver for us is meal planning. We have a meal plan/shopping list that hangs inside our pantry door, ensuring that when something runs out, we can it right to the list. Using the coupons that we have clipped along with trying at least one new recipe each week, we plan out our weekly meals before we head off to the grocery store.

Only spending time shopping for what we need, saving some money not buying what we don’t need and then doing as much of the preparation ahead of time means all we need to do is peek at the planner each day and make whatever is on the list!

5. Set Up a Dump Zone

We use a memo station to stash kid’s papers that we get home throughout the week, along with all of our mail.

Each Sunday I take a quick 10-15 minutes and recycle or file all the papers in each slot. We also have a dump basket with the same philosophy.

Since piles can form so quickly, and as much as I believe in the “return things right where you found them” idea, it’s not always practical. Keeping one basket or bin dedicated to dumping our “stuff” each week, is easy to stash away when company comes, and is gone through at least once a week to return items to their home. This is also a great task for little ones looking for ways to become more helpful around the abode!

Jennifer is currently a stay at home mom, that not only cares for her own children {three uber beautiful little boys}, but also has the opportunity to spend her days with a couple other little ones as well, as a daycare mom. She is also currently working to start up an in-home organizing business, manage an organizing blog {where she talks about things like managing cleaning schedules and creating easy ways for kids to get organized} and working on expanding an Etsy shop as well.