A Tip to Share Pics

We don't live near our families, so I wanted to easily share pictures of Baby A with them and I found a great way to do it using Shutterfly.  They have a feature that allows you to set up your own website to share photos.  I was previously a devoted Snapfish user and would invite people to view my photo folders, but I've found that this Shutterfly share site is much easier to use for sharing photos!  I love it because it is essentially like a photo blog.

I also like that there are various privacy settings that you can select.  I have ours password protected so that no crazies out there are looking at photos of my sweet baby!  The way that I set up my site, I invited friends and family and sent them the password.  

In addition, others can upload their photos to the site and share with us.  (However, if your family is like mine, they won't ever upload pics to it.)    It also allows you to add text posts and store up to 6 videos.  

Photos that you add to the share site are also automatically added to your Shutterfly account, so you can easily order photos too.  Seriously, I've found this to be a huge timesaver and it's worth checking out if you are looking for an easy way to keep people up-to-date on your family.  

One of My Best Ideas Ever!!

One thing that we do not do well in our house is cook meals.  Before our baby arrived, too often, we'd wait until the last minute to decide what to eat.  Then, we wouldn't want to cook or it would take too long to make, so we'd go out.  It's been my goal for a long time to eat out less.  We've tried to plan meals before, but it becomes a huge ordeal to actually choose what to make. 
Well, the other day I had the most ingenious idea I've had in a long time.  Why not let something else pick the meals for me??? 

I'm a researcher, so I use http://www.random.org/ pretty often to generate random number lists.  Why not let it choose meals for me?  This is what I did, I made a numbered list of all the dinners that we eat, plus numbers for "new recipe", "eat out", and some generic choices like, "frozen meal" and "chicken whatever".  I decided to make a meal plan (sort of like a school cafeteria menu) for one month.  Because I assume that we'd eat leftovers at least once per week, I generated 21 integers between the numbers of 1 and 38 (the number of items on my list) and had it formatted in 4 columns.  So, not only did it choose the meals, it also picked which week we would eat them.  Then I put the meals into a calendar, printed it, and hung it on the refrigerator.  Doing this made it a lot easier to write my shopping list and helps me remember to take things out of the freezer.  All in all, the system hasn't been perfect, but it's a big improvement over our previous "no plan" system.  We have made last minute rearrangements, but I think that it's helping us eat healthier AND save money.