The iPhone Mommy: A Guest Post

By Rachel

The adjustment, sleeplessness, and busyness of being a new Mom can really take up a majority of one’s mental processing space, and then when you add to that trying to keep up with feedings, diapers, naps, and every other event in your baby’s life that you must control and time, it’s nearly impossible.

With my first child, I kept a ridiculously detailed and arduous notebook about everything related to her well-being.  Although it took quite a bit of effort to keep up with, I don’t know that I could have survived without it – at least without my daughter being fed hours too late because I lost track of when she last ate.

Shared Shopping Lists for Married People

A natural thing to do when you get an iPhone is begin to use it to capture your grocery list.  Most people simply use the built-in Notes app to write a list just like they would on paper.  However, if you and your spouse have an iPhone, there is a far better option.

Before I tell you what this better option is, let me describe a scenario.  Imagine you are at work and your spouse is at Walmart (or any store, for that matter).  You are not sure if she added this new cereal you wanted to try to her list.  You can call her and text her and then ask her, but you aren't sure the exact name of it and there are several flavors.  What do you do?  Similar scenarios to this happen often.

My wife and I started using Grocery iQ recently to solve this kind of a problem.  Grocery iQ has a huge database of foods, toiletries, and other products.  Because it autocompletes items you add from its database, you can type only a few letters and then pick the exact product you want, eliminating the ambiguity usually associated with not wanting to type too many letters when creating your list.

Best of all, if you create an account on the Grocery iQ web site, you can share your list with your spouse so that anything you add or your spouse adds is immediately on the other one's list.  As a bonus, you can add items to your list on the web site even easier if you are already sitting at a computer.  I often will add to the grocery list on the web site if I realize something we need while I'm sitting at work.  I'm already in front of a computer, so it is very convenient.

Another benefit of the shared shopping list is that if we can easily switch up who does the shopping without having to transfer lists.  We simply always have the other one's list.