Busy pretty much sums up every which way life becomes when kids are in the picture. When it comes to taking care of yourself and taking care of your little ones, we'll take all the help we can get. From ordering groceries to monitoring your health to exercising to staying in touch with health professionals, here's my list of must-have apps.
1. Instacart: This is a grocery-ordering app. The app provides an online portal connection with grocery store chains such as Fairway, Whole Foods, and CostCo. In cities such as New York, having the access to such stores without having to leave your own home is key especially during the winter months. Delivery is only 3.99 when you purchase $35 or more. Most of the time, there is a delivery available within two hours but during peak times i.e. holidays, inclement weather, delivery can be booked out as far as 2 days. As the mother of a toddler, I'm quite satisfied at least 95% of the time with using Instacart. When planning for little ones, check out brands such as Annie's Homegrown and Happy Family -- both have a variety of breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack options.
2. Fooducate: Fooducate is an app that helps you make better, informed decisions about the groceries you purchase for your household. The app has an extensive database of products - all associated with a grading scale. The grade scale helps to understand the exact positioning of the product, how good/bad the ingredients included are for you, and any call to attention details about the product (i.e. additives, preservatives, hidden sugars) that we should know. You can scan products and receive real time "grades," or utilize the Fooducate community to obtain recipes, ask questions and educate yourself at any time.
3. Honey: Honey is the first social nutrition App and the only nutrition App created by experienced registered dietitians (RDs). For anyone wanting educational tidbits from RDs, Honey delivers easy to read real-time nutrition information, tips, recommendations, recipes, and new product reviews pertaining to a variety of health categories, including: Healthy, Fit, Hearty, Kid, Lite, Sugar, Tasty, Fertile, and Buzz. Users can ask any nutrition questions they may have and a multitude of dietitians will answer. It's like having a nutritionist in your pocket (and it's free!)
4. Clue: Clue is an application to help you track your menstrual cycle. By entering the necessary information on a monthly basis, it uses an algorithm to calculate and predict your own unique cycle. The more you use Clue, the more accurate it gets. Clue includes educational material about the menstrual cycle, answering questions like: Is my cycle normal? When can I get pregnant? What is PMS? If you're goal is also to track fertility, by providing additional content, the application provides a "predicted timeframe" to assist in the process. Sometimes accidents happen...but if you're trying to be proactive about it, using an app like Clue is worth it. (Half of us can barely remember what we ate for breakfast the same day.)
5. Booya Fitness: Think "Netflix for Fitness." The app feeds off the Booya Fitness website and offers offline syncing similar to how Spotify allows you to listen to your playlists without being connected to Wi-Fi. You can workout mostly anywhere when using the app and for many of the workouts, you don't need equipment. The other perk is that many of the workouts are under 35 minutes so you could slip it in at various times during the day. Lucky for us, Booya has partnered with a variety of popular boutique fitness brands in order ensure you never feel bored and that there's always a workout for the mood you're in that day.
6. FRND: Your on-call nurse! With FRND, parents can rejoice over the idea of never having to wait for countless hours in the ER or doctor's office for their sick child to be diagnosed and treated. FRND provides everything a doctors visit would, from testing vitals to sending prescriptions to the nearest pharmacy. From urgent care to rehab or elderly care, to IV therapy and pregnancy consultation's, FRND is a helpful solution. The cost: $99 flat fee. FRND delivers registered nurses and nurse practitioners directly to a patient's door (whatever their location) in under an hour. Currently, there is no on-demand service specifically for nursing services and through the vast network of registered nurses, FRND is able to provide a faster and more cost-effective service to patients over other healthcare services currently available.
*Content from this post was previously published via Well Rounded New York