Best iOS Apps for Stay at Home Parents

Often times people think of business people and college kids when they think of smartphones like the iPhone, but there are plenty of stay-at-home/work-from-home parents who own iPhones and iPod Touches as well. That's why I've decided to share my top three app recommendations for the the home:

Grocery iQ- This is one of my favorite apps because it allows my husband and I to share a single grocery list. It syncs between our phones so he can add something to the list from work, it'll automatically add it to my phone, and when I purchase the item and mark it off, it automatically removes it from the list on his phone so he knows he doesn't have to stop at the store. This app also has lots of coupons, a favorites list for commonly purchased items, a store locator and it can save your savings cards so you don't have to carry them with you.

Betty Crocker- The Betty Crocker app is one of my favorites for those "I need to use this up before it goes bad" times. You can search through recipes by ingredients ("I have kielbasa and black beans..."), browse by main ingredient "What can I make with chickpeas?" or search recipes by name "Lets make chicken enchiladas." Once you find a recipe you like, you can save it right in the app so you don't have to search for it all over again.

Mint- There's a reason stay-at-home parents are also called home economists. Mint is a financial app that ties into a website that helps you manage and track your finances with ease and sans jargon. It's easy to make a budget, link your credit cards and bank accounts, and then track how you're doing on your budget right from the app. Considering ordering dinner out? Open the app and see if it's in your budget to eat out this month. The website also allows you to track your loans and credit card balances so you have one place to see how far you've come in paying them off.

Practical Tip of the Day:
Have kids that like to play with your iPhone, but sometimes leave it in... odd places? Sign up for iCloud for free using your Apple ID (the log in you use to purchase apps) and then turn on "Find My iPhone" in your iPhone's settings. Lost phone? Go to icloud.com, log in, and click "Find My iPhone." It'll use the GPS to locate your phone ("Oh good, it's not at the daycare center!") and from there you can send it a message (if maybe it IS at the daycare center) or make it ring, even if you left it on silent! The last part is particularly helpful if you're like me and often leave your phone silenced, and tend to find it between couch cushions or under a pile of stuffed animals.

What is Syncing?

Let's say you have a computer and an MP3 player. (Click here if you don't know what an MP3 player is.) How do you get the songs you want from your computer onto the player? You sync them! What in the world does that mean? "Syncing" is short for "synchronizing," and it does just that; it synchronizes the information from two devices.

If two people are doing synchronized swimming, they're swimming in the exact same way. If two devices are synchronized, they have the same information on them. Lots of different devices can be synchronized: MP3 players, computers, smartphones and even more obscure concepts like "the cloud" can be synchronized with your information. If you're syncing something like a smartphone, you're often connecting it to your computer- either physically or wirelessly- and software on the computer walks you through the process of picking which things you'd like to sync. Here's an example of iTunes (a computer program) syncing an iPod (an MP3 player):

On the more obscure end, things like your bookmarks can be synced between devices using various methods. Bookmarks are website address you've saved so you can easily go back to the website without having to search or remember the address. It's like speed-dial for the Internet. Using a service like Google, you can have a bookmark created on your work computer appear on your home computer by syncing the two computers. See how this can be very handy? On the downside, if something gets messed up, you could also end up with doubles or triples of your items or worse yet, end up loosing the synced information entirely.

Practical Tip of the Day:

Before starting to sync information, make sure you have a backup of your information just in case one of those worse-case-scenarios happens. That way, if you botched syncing your address book from your phone to your computer and loose them all, you can go back to your backup and get them all over again.