Happy Monday, friends! How was your weekend?
My family just returned from 2.5 mostly glorious days at the Oregon Coast. I’m excited to soon share a review of The Coho Oceanfront Lodge with you soon and some travel tips to Lincoln City, Oregon. The weather was absolutely PERFECT and the beach provided much-needed relaxation therapy for me, my husband, and the Bliss Kids.
In the meantime, it’s back to the grind…
Summertime, and the living’s (not so) easy
Summertime means a lot of juggling in my house: work, family, vacations, working around client vacations, activities with the kids. It’s like my school year mom entrepreneur routine on steroids: my scheduling and planning skills are working overtime, and I’m getting less sleep than usual as I try to balance the kids’ independent play time and our family activity and adventure time during the day. One nice thing about having awesome clients is that I know the majority of them are also juggling: I’ve had conference calls with their babies babbling into the phone and coffee meetings where their kids are playing with my kids. It doesn’t make the juggling act easier, necessarily, rather it helps make it just a little more manageable and enjoyable.
I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t do the work/life balance juggling act without my mobile phone, WiFi access, and smart mom entrepreneur-friendly apps. I’ve written about some of my fave apps for mom entrepreneurs before. Now here are two newer-to-me mobile apps that help me stay on top of things while I am out and about juggling work and family this summer: Feedly and A Beautiful Mess.
Goodbye Google Reader, hello Feedly
Yesterday was the official final day of Google Reader. The feed reader that so many of us have come to rely on all these years for managing our blog and news feeds is no longer. While there have been many lengthy articles out there debating the pros and cons of alternative feed readers, I’ll keep my two cents simple: I love Feedly.
I used the Google Reader import, which quickly and easily (no tears, ma!) imported all of my favorite news & blog feeds into my new Feedly account. If you’d like to add Urban Bliss Life to your Feedly reader, plug in http://www.urbanblisslife.com/feed into your search bar in Feedly. Or, you can try this Feedly-specific URL in your web browser once you are logged into Feedly.
The Feedly mobile app is AWESOME. It is well-designed, sleek, and super easy to manage adding feeds, removing feeds, and, most importantly, reading feeds in a quick and efficient manner. If you like to move through your news feeds quickly like I do, and if you are a visual person as I am, you will love Feedly!
My life in prettified pictures, thanks to A Beautiful Mess
If you’re active on Instagram, you likely already know about the A Beautiful Mess app. A Beautiful Mess is only $0.99 and allows you to beautify your photos with various borders, filters, and text. The recent upgrade included quite a few new fun additions, including one of my favorite fonts: Lobster, used in the photo below.
Again, speed is the name of the game when it comes to running an efficient, productive work/family juggling act during the summer, and I find the A Beautiful Mess app to be quick to navigate and then also to integrate photos into Instagram. Connectivity is key for many of us mom entrepreneurs, and I can snap photos quickly while out & about with the kids, prettify them in A Beautiful Mess, then upload and share via Instagram.
I use a host of other favorite mobile apps to keep me running year-round, but these are two newer ones that help keep me smiling this summer.
If you’re a fellow mom who works from home, I’d love to know: what other apps help you juggle work and the kids being home for the summer?