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Looking forward to hearing from you!

There is SOOOOO much out there! The difficulty is in making a choice and deciding whether you want to pay for it or not. I spent some time looking at what is out there. What I found is only a fraction of what is on offer. And a small disclaimer here: I am not personally recommending any app. – they look good, they have a good rep. and if they are not free they have free trials. Try them out and see what works for you.

I  love the name of this one! It’s free too. Get reminded, anywhere, locate your tasks, work together and share tasks, organize the way you want – lists or notes etc. Add tasks wherever you are.  It’s interface is clear and simple.

Life Balance

Life Balance is award winning coaching software that provides a dynamically ordered To Do List driven by the importance of your goals, your desired allocation of time and effort, and feedback from what you get done each day.

TimeGT is built to make life and tasks handling much easier and more accessible. TimeGT offers numerous ways to organize tasks, ideas and notes. It will suit a wide range of time management techniques used by different people: Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen, important-urgent method by Dwight D. Eisenhower, First Things First by Stephen Covey, and many others.

Organize your schedule and share events with friends. With Google’s free online calendar, it’s easy to keep track of life’s important events all in one place. Share your schedule. Let your family and friends see your calendar, and view schedules that others have shared with you. Get your calendar on the go. Access your calendar from your phone using its built-in calendar or mobile browser. Never forget another event Get event reminders via email or have text messages sent right to your mobile phone.

Medical: Last night I was up sorting through Lorraine’s files taking a look at all the medical information on Roxanne: reports, assessments, doctors, prescriptions, medical research, support workers… a lot of information, all of it important. I was so keenly aware of how much information and knowledge Lorraine needs to have have in her head and at hand at any given time. So, when you are creating your medical files be very specific with your categories. Particularly when there are other children and family members. Try not to make any “catch-all” categories like – “Info”. It may take more time to set up but it’s worth it.

These are the categories I set up for Roxanne for example: Assessments, Doctors, Medication, Receipts and Medical Research. Your child might have different needs. For example there may be a number of specialists involved – some behavioral and others clinical. So your Doctors categories may look something like this: Doctors – Speech Therapist: Reports, Doctors – Speech Therapist: Excercises. Be specific.

Part 1 – 13th December

I was talking with a friend of mine, Lorraine, a single parent who has a 22 year old daughter who is special needs and she mentioned how she wanted to find more support for her and her daughter. Children are truly the greatest blessing in anyone’s life. That doesn’t mean that rearing them is easy . There never seems to be enough time or energy to stay on top of the “managing” – logistically – of their lives.

But when you have a child that is special needs, a disability, disease,  those demands; time, energy, resources and finances seem to spiral out of control. Your time is focused on immediate needs. I asked Lorraine if she wouldn’t mind showing me all her paper files. She looked so uncomfortable, so sad. “There are no “files” Isolde” she said, “there are just boxes and boxes of papers. I make sure I keep everything but I don’t have the time to sort them”.

After taking a look at all of Lorraine’s files and discussing all the demands of her day to day life I resolved to take up the challenge and use this blog to chronicle the many areas and needs of organizing the life of a child with special needs.

Some of Lorraine's boxes of papers

Categories for filing

Assessments – Medical and Educational: This needs to be kept up to date. Quite often when you are looking to qualify for care, transport, medical accessories, extra curricular activities and government programs you will need to reference these.

Education – Report cards, Schools, Contact information for students and school, Calenders, Correspondence: Roxanne also has a seizure disorder which means that some days Lorraine will be talking to the school a lot or keeping her home. It can be very difficult to keep up to date with every teacher and classmates. There are always forms to be filled out too and keeping on top of these can take up a lot of time particularly when there is medication involved which there is with Roxanne. Keep all the report cards but make sure you keep the other categories current or it can get very confusing when you need a name, number or form immediately.

Extra Curricular Activities: Choir, swimming, art, Summer Camp, Potential, etc: Keep this up to date so that you know when to renew programs. Roxanne is sooooo creative – her art is fantastic. She also has perfect pitch as a singer and can sing every song from the Wizzard of Oz! There are so many programs out there. what usually happens is that you see a flier on a new one that looks promising but forget where you put it when you got home. That’s why it’s important to have a “Potential” file. Put all those fliers, notes etc in there.