Grocery, Meal & Day Planners

I've never been the organised type but with a family to run you kind of have no choice but to change if only to make the day run a little more smoothly. In order to get my head around what I need to do during the week I have invested in a trio of planners where I can jot it all down.

The first, a 2014 diary, keeps my week ahead all laid out and prepared. Whether it's doctors appointments, meeting up with friends or random "must do this today!" notes I leave myself, I find myself being more on top of things with a simple diary. I picked this one up at the local newsagency for $14. When shopping for a perfect diary I only had two requirements:

1) It had to be in a weekly format because those a day to a page diaries give me the shits and I want to see my whole week in one go to know what's ahead.

2) It had to be girly. Pink, florals, pretty... you get the idea.

This ABC Gardening Australia diary ($14) is awesome. I love the layout, I love the beautiful flowers decorating every page and I love the overall design of the diary itself. It has heaps of gardening tips if you are into that sort of thing but it is rendered useless on me because my garden doesn't exist and if anything resembles a rundown old Western movie set... dry, dusty and brown. Nothing to be proud of there.

To fix my not so healthy food habits (you've no doubt seen the amount of cakes I post on Instagram) and that of the family's, I trotted down to the city yesterday and popped into David Jones to visit their Kikki K collection where I picked up this awesome shopping list and weekly meal planner.

...and yes, a mountain of crap does live on top of my fridge, as does a piece of my daughter's artwork and a birthday card I got from my hubby yesterday. I'm 29 now, not afraid to say it and definitely not one of those women who weeps over her advancing age - every extra year we get to live is a blessing so we should be grateful for the chance to become older. Looking forward to my 30's!

The grocery list ($14.95) already has the food broken down into their sections which is pretty damn close to the way I section off my usual grocery list. That feature by itself is so handy and pretty much why I grabbed it. The pad comes with 60 sheets so you can use it every week for a whole year (or will last two years if you're like me and do your food shopping fortnightly). It comes with a pen that hooks onto the pad so you don't lose it (I always do) and is magnetised so it sticks to your fridge.

The meal planner ($9.95) is also magnetised and sorts out your three main meals plus snacks. I'm using it as a way to map out better pregnancy foods for myself because left to my own devices I will probably just lick cake all day and thus give birth to a diabetic sumo wrestler. Having it all written down in front of me works better for me in that I can plan my meals ahead of time and also write in what I did eat during the day that wasn't planned so I'm more aware of what goes in my stomach in order to kick my bad food habits once and for all.

Word of advice - don't go in Kikki K alone. Your wallet will never make it out alive - there's just way too much cute stuff to grab. I had my hubby with me to keep me inline otherwise I would have walked out with half the shop while draining our bank account. Even walking past the glorious Royal Albert tea sets was enough for him to grab me by the hand like a wayward child and lead me out the door. He knows me too well. I'm far too attached to anything pretty and floral!