Put your to do list to work

Ever feel like there wasn’t enough time in the day? You just about find time to eat, sleep, work, and make sure everyone else is doing what they are supposed to be doing. And then the weekend arrives and it’s tax-filing season, back to school, the leaking roof still hasn’t been fixed since winter, the oil mark under your car is doubling in size every day, and you still haven’t booked your Easter holiday.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a bit of a helping hand while you are working your way down your to do list? Freeing up your time for things that are a bit more fun and relaxing, as well as being able to give yourself a pat on the back for being so organised?

Now Capetonians do, with the help of Toodu, www.toodu.co.za. Toodu is a new service that transforms your online to do list into introductions to local service providers who can help you complete your tasks. Not only that, the service providers want your business so will provide all the information you need and do their best to impress you.

How Toodu works:

1. Go to Toodu.co.za (It’s free)
2. Fill in your Toodu items
3. Take a break
4. Start receiving the information, quotes, prices or proposals you need. (Toodu lets you know by email when you have received a response, so you don’t have to keep checking back).
5. Choose who you want to work with and get in contact with them. Toodu doesn’t share your details with the suppliers so you won’t get any pesky spam.
6. Tick the item off your to do list.

Toodu has some pretty rigorous service standards, and any supplier that doesn’t live up to these doesn’t last long.

Toodu is the brainchild of South African entrepreneurs, Lee Hartman, Richard Hartley, and Nick Goossens who were convinced that there was a better way to find and interact with day-to-day service providers.

“We realised that although searching the Internet was great for finding lots of information, it wasn’t that good for finding specific products and services that met your individual requirements,” said Hartman, Toodu CEO. “Then, once you found the correct contact details, getting information, prices or quotes and deciding who to deal with is time consuming and often frustrating. We decided that finding and engaging with businesses shouldn’t be this hard.”

Toodu is currently a beta service and only available in Cape Town and its suburbs, but is coming soon to other South African cities.

About Toodu
Toodu is more than just a to do list. Adding an item to your Toodu list activates a non-intrusive introduction to the people and companies that have put up their hands and said they can help you get what you need to do, done.
Stop searching and get what you need to come to you.

For more information visit: www.toodu.co.za

Treating parents like babies

By Lenore Skenazy

If you’re a mother, you might recognise the sentiment “sweet wishes” from the passive-aggressive baby industry that wants you to feel so completely, even dangerously unprepared for the challenges (they’re always challenges) of parenthood that you’ll read its magazines, buy its products and take its advice. Ka-ching!

Here’s a tip from an article on flying a kite with your kid: “Choose a sunny day when there’s no chance of lightning.” You mean, don’t fly kites when there’s a funnel cloud headed for the driveway? Got it. Or how about this pointer from a parenting magazine on how to delight your baby: “Lean in close and kiss her nose.”? Kissing my baby. Why didn’t I think of that?

And here’s my favourite recommendation from a book of “Baby Must-Haves: (a tome on items you simply must buy unless you want baby to be seriously deprived). You’ll get more bang for your buck with a toy that can be played with in more than one way – for instance, a push toy that can also be pulled.”? Now, you’ve got to feel sorry for the poor writer who had to come up with something, anything to say about a pull toy. But can you think of a push toy that can’t be pulled? Can you think of any toy that can’t be pulled, besides a cranky daddy trying to watch a sports channel?

These tips treat parents as if we were the two-yearolds, so wet behind the ears that we need an expert to tell us which games to play, which toys to buy, what to say to our kids and what to feed them. This talking down to parents is big business. The whole gestalt is enough to convince moms that today’s children, unlike those who came before them, do not have their trajectory well mapped out simply by being born human: cry, crawl, toddle, walk, grow up, breed and cry some more.

No, this generation won’t make it without a whole lot of help from specialists, safety gear and Internet searches. But why? Are our children more vulnerable, and we less competent than any previous generation in history?

Parenting culture

Of course not. But that’s the message we get. We live in a time when parents worry about their offspring’s safety, development and health and you name it more than ever, thanks to a parenting industry that relies on turning us into nervous wrecks. It begins even before the baby’s born. There are books and books about what to eat during pregnancy.

As my doctor told me: Just eat like you normally would, only a little more – and add some folic acid. That kind of counsel is too reasonable for the parenting-industrial complex. Taking a chipper-butchiding approach that set the tone for a generation of parenting advice, the What to Expect When You’re Expecting pregnancy guide goes so far as to remind moms-to-be that “each bite” is a chance to give their babies the perfect start. Which must mean that not making “each bite”? nutritionally stellar risks ruining your kid forever.

There’s no rest for the weary parent in this high-alert world, especially after the bundle arrives. Take the baby bath thermometer. The cheapest one looks like a rubber duck. Place it in the tub and if the bathwater is too hot, these words magically appear on its tummy: “TOO HOT.”?

You’d have to be convinced that you’re incapable of testing the temperature with your own hand before you’d buy the gadget. But that’s what that crafty duck is out to do: undermine your confidence in your childrearing

capabilities.

(Forget that the instructions on the package remind adults to “ALWAYS” check the temperature with their hands first!) It’s hard to feel secure about being a good mom when every decision is fraught with consequences.

Things have changed dramatically in a single generation. The worries that make us hyperventilate didn’t even faze our moms. It’s just that then people didn’t see every tiny parenting decision as a big deal.

They didn’t sweat the way we do because they were reading Dr Spock, the child-care guru of the 1950s and 60s, who famously began his book Baby and Child Carewith the words: “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do. Not, Freak out! Your baby is at a super-important stage and you must devote every fibre of your being to helping him ace it.”?

Today is a day to thank those moms for all they did. It’s also a day to thank the current crop of moms, stuck trying to do their best in the face of a parenting culture that’s insisting, “You’re not doing it right!”? Yes we are. Or at least we’re doing it right enough, thank you, and the odds are very much on our side.

Lenore Skenazy is the author of Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry

• This article was originally published on page 23 of The Mercury on July 13, 2009