Planning family meals can be a challenge when everyone has a different schedule. Pediatric dietitian Alexandra Turnbull says this digital calendar helps her family coordinate their days, plan easier meals, and take some of the mental load out of feeding everyone.
She is a registered dietitian and mother of two who specializes in pediatric nutrition and helping families develop healthy, positive relationships with food. She is the founder of The Family Nutritionist, where she provides practical nutrition guidance to parents and families navigating mealtimes, picky eating, and other feeding challenges.
Staying organized can be difficult for anyone, never mind those juggling multiple responsibilities and children, on top of their social lives. And then there’s planning dinners. Things can get messy if you don’t have a way to keep everyone’s schedule coordinated.
That’s why Alexandra Turnbull, a registered dietitian and mother of two, turns to the Skylight Calendar, a digital touchscreen calendar that keeps her family’s lives organized in a central location.
“When people ask me if it’s worth it, it’s the fastest ‘yes’ that I always give,” she says. “Feeding kids and our families, so much involves our schedules and what we’re doing and what we can make certain nights. The Skylight Calendar we’ve had for three years now, and it just allows us to organize things so that our executive functioning can be at a better place where we can plan meals and actually eat a balanced meal together when we can.”
The Skylight Calendar’s color-coded profiles allow family members to easily track each person’s schedule, and it can also be used as a task logger to let children know what chores they need to complete.
“That has been really helpful for us to give reminders as well,” Turnbull says. “My kids have tasks and chores, so I can give them the autonomy to go and look for themselves and do it themselves, so it’s a great product. We love it…I have two neurodivergent kids, so they need lots of reminders, but we can have them go back to this task list and really look at what they have to do versus nagging them all the time.”
She believes this can be a better way to teach children about responsibilities as they get older.
“It really kind of helps them be more independent in a way and learn some of those skills,” Turnbull says.
The tablet can be synced with Google Calendar, Outlook, and most other online calendar or scheduling software.
The ability to add or edit tasks across different software comes in handy when Turnbull and her husband need to coordinate their schedules, and it allows the pediatric nutrition expert to easily shift her family’s meal prep schedule as needed.
“My husband works a full-time job, and then he also referees multiple sports,” she says. “So he's gone in the evening, so we can see each other's schedule, which is really helpful. So like tonight my daughter has drums, so I knew I had to plan a really easy meal because we have something in the evening. Or maybe we’re going out that night to eat. So it helps us organize what we’ve got going on. It’s a great piece of technology.”
Starting at $300, it’s a little on the pricey side, but Turnbull has found that it’s proven its worth more than once in the three years she’s had hers.
“It’s one of the fastest [digital calendars],” she says. “And I definitely think it's worth the investment, even if you get a smaller one. It's just so helpful in taking out the hours and the mental load of planning things.”
