When my twins were born, I was suddenly thrust into the world of being a stay-at-home mom. Naively, I had never pictured what my life would be like once I had children. When the option was available for me to stay home, I knew that was the best choice for us, but I had no idea how to manage our day-to-day. How does one go about making the change from being career-focused to being in charge of running a home and family?

I was thrilled when I discovered Simple Mom, a blog written by Tsh Oxenreider. Tsh’s writing has been an inspiration to me, and her blog’s motto, “Live simply, stay sane. Life hacks for home managers,” is right up my alley.

Tsh recently wrote a fantastic blog post called 20 Tips for Finding Your Routine With Kids. This post is a great overview about learning the ins and outs of being a stay-at-home mom. Not only does she provide the promised 20 tips on getting through your day while taking care of your home and your children, she also discusses getting into a routine and ideas about setting a schedule that is good for your family. This is exactly the post I could have used when I was learning to be a stay-at-home mom. Honestly, even three years later, I am still learning to find my groove and this post gave me some great ideas. Maybe it can provide you with some ideas and inspiration on ways to streamline the management of your family! - Sara I.

Do you have a limited play space? We sure do. To keep the mess at bay, we've come up with a simple solution that is both tidy and cheap - a bucket-based toy rotation.

Hang a nice looking shelf somewhere high enough that your child cannot reach it. Find some containers (we use one recycled bucket and one bucket that came with a toy set). Then communicate with your partner that the rule is that only one bucket can be off the shelf at any given time, and stick to it.

The benefits of this system are clear once you've gotten used to it. You never have a huge horrible mess of toys, because half of them are always put away. Forgotten toys in one bucket are far more exciting when they are reunited with their pint-sized owner days later - almost as if they are brand new. Teaching the art of pointing to what you want, a very important baby skill, is easy when the buckets are two different shapes, colors, or sizes.

Perhaps most importantly, your child (and you) is encouraged to learn to pick up one mess before another one is created. If you really stick to the one bucket at a time rule, soon your kid will start to help you pack up the old bucket with the desire to get to the new one. A good lesson to instill early! - Leigh G.

I’ve always known about baby-friendly laundry detergent and fabric softener, but I had no idea you could buy baby-friendly dish soap! Dapple Dish Liquid is an all-natural dish soap that is phthalate-free, paraben-free, and dye-free. It features award-winning "green" technology that targets milk residue (all too common on bottles and other feeding gear) and baking soda to fight odor. The ingredients list is rather impressive only because I can actually understand each ingredient, from purified water and baking soda to tree oils and natural amino acids.

Dapple rinses quickly and uses essential oil for a light lavender fragrance. It is also biodegradable, environmentally safe, free of detectable levels of dioxane (a known eye and respiratory tract irritant) and has not been tested on animals. Kind of makes me wonder just what's in the current bottle of dish soap sitting on my sink…

You can purchase a 16-oz. bottle of Dabble for about $6 from Amazon.com or a case of six 17-oz. bottles for about $42 from Dapple's website. - Emily H.

Products that are good for several things at once save time, space and effort. One favorite item of mine is Weleda Calendula soap. It’s a regular bar of soap, but in our house it has served three important purposes.

When I was pregnant, and for the first two months post-partum, I developed several horrible full body rashes. Itchy, miserable… I shudder to even recall the torture. This soap was suggested to me by an herbalist at a local natural body product shop, and I have to say it definitely was soothing. It didn’t cure the rashes (that unfortunately required prednisone) but it did make me feel better.

Once the baby was here, I noticed the soap was labeled for use with babies. Sure enough, it is great on my son’s skin, and works really well for a shampoo as well. As a bonus, it smells great.

So there you have it - balm for rashy moms, soap for newborn, and nice-smelling shampoo for baby’s hair. All for a reasonable price considering it is a very long-lasting bar! - Leigh G.

If there is one thing that your baby is guaranteed to do (aside from loving you) it is emit bodily fluids. Whether we are talking pee, spit-up, drool, actual vomit, or all of these at once, the baby will be making a mess.

You’ll need to cope with these fluids somehow. If you want to minimize your expenditure on paper towels, and don't feel like buying a heck of a lot of actual spit-up rags or burp cloths, here are some other options for wiping, sopping, and dabbing.

Dish cloths. Dish cloths are great because once baby grows out of the fluids stage, you’ll still have them for use in your kitchen. Buy a dozen- they work wonderfully.

Face cloths and hand towels. Along with the dish cloths, you can use small terry towels. Again, the added bonus is that once baby outgrows the fluids stage, they are still useful in your household.

Cloth diapers. If you already have cloth diapers this is ideal. To prevent using them up too fast, we sort our laundry by its yuckiness level- so a cloth diaper that has a bit of drool and spit-up in it goes in the "baby laundry" while an otherwise identical cloth diaper soaked in urine goes in the "diaper laundry."

Onesies. Sure, you put them on the baby as clothing. But if you got dozens of them as gifts, why not use some as rags, too? They are convenient, soft, absorbent, and in many babies' wardrobes they are really plentiful. Cute tee shirt yesterday, wiping up drool today, toss it in the laundry and it’s a cute tee shirt again tomorrow.

Receiving blankets. Big messes require big rags. Don’t discount blankets - for drool, try to use them a couple of times (perhaps four messes, one for each corner) to minimize your laundry load.

Leftover paper napkins from restaurants. I don’t know about you, but I have a bunch of these in a drawer that I never remember to use. Recently I started putting them in the diaper bag for on-the-go fluids removal. So handy! I’m not usually a paper products kind of girl, but I figured if I already have these stored up in my house, might as well put them to good use. - Leigh G.