Keeping up with Children's Activities, Healthy Snacks and Meals
by Jodie Lynn, www.ParentToParent.com

It's the fall time and families are busier than ever. Keeping up with children's activities and serving low-crab meals and snacks are more important than ever!

Here are ten pure and simple "Life and Health Savers."

1. Have a large "at-a-glance" calendar. Place it on the counter by the telephone. Write any appointments, deadlines or activities on it with a colored pencil. Put the person's name or initials followed by the event. Use different color pencils for each name. Use the same color for the same person. Everyone can glance at the calendar and know what is going on by color.

2. Have a large calendar on the wall. Make sure it has big squares representing the days of the month. Try the award-winning Think Bin...two very busy moms (see www.ThinkBin.com) created it. Write down everything - including meal choices that each member of the family has decided on. This way, there will not be any "what are we having for dinner" questions or who chose it.

3. Organize your day by time. Clip all papers from camp counselors, childcare teachers or anything from the school for the upcoming school year in chronological order on the refrigerator. Once a week make a schedule of the following weeks' events, organized by day. Each day is organized by time. This schedule is posted on the refrigerator. Don't forget to add who is to do what to help in the kitchen and other chores.

4. Keep a diary by the telephone. Each day is a page, and all activities are entered plus meals for the week. You can often refer to it for what happened the previous year around the same time and even look to see if there was a meal you cooked that the family particularly enjoyed.

5. Plan snacks and meals in advance. Having meals planned in advance can save time, energy and arguments. If you know your weekend is going to be spent mainly in the car, quick easy to clean up meals and snacks are timesaving and healthy alternatives to stopping at the fast food window. Cut up vegetables the evening before and place in a glass container filled halfway with water. This keeps them extremely crisp. Drain them in the morning and place in the top tray of an ice chest enclosed in a “freezer” baggie. Place sliced fruit in a freezer bag in the same area.

6. Limit or cut out carbohydrates that are filled with starch (like bread and pasta) - especially made with white flour.

7. Cook and serve Tofu. There are so many ways you can use tofu instead of other fattening things that you will soon see a huge difference in your taste buds not to mention everyone's waistline. Try Korean-Tofu for low carbs and less fat.

8. Stick with vegetables for an equal amount of nutritional carbs for your meals and snacks. Try to utilize the green ones like green beans, broccoli, asparagus mixed with garlic and onions.

9. Try to cut out prepackaged snacks and ready-to-go meals (frozen pizza and meals to go in a box). They are usually high in sodium content, as well as heavy in both fats and carbs. I’m not saying it’s a good idea to cut out all of the carbs with kids. In fact, everyone needs some for certain nutritional values. Watch out for "trans-fat" in prepackaged snack foods. The medical society and now the food companies are mainly concerned about this one. In fact, Kraft was one of the first to begin taking this out of their snacks and now has a new improved trans-fat-free Oreo cookie and many of the other food giants are following. Look up trans-fat on the Internet to find out more about it.

10. Serve and consume fruits in moderation unless they are low in sugar and fructose. Some of those are raspberries, blueberries and strawberries.

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© 2005 Jodie Lynn
Jodie Lynn is an award-winning internationally syndicated family/health columnist and radio personality. Her syndicated column Parent to Parent(parenttoparent.com) has been successful for over 10 years and appears in newspapers, magazines, newsletters and throughout the Internet. Her latest best-selling parenting/family book is Mommy-CEO, revised edition. Preorder Lynn's new book, "Mom CEO: Avoiding the Distressed Housewife Syndrome and Winning at Motherhood," online or from any bookstore in mid 2006.