Mom's organizers take off

HOLLY SPRINGS -- Jeannine Pennington had a schedule for her family. The only problem was that it was crammed in her head.

Work, doctor's appointments, soccer games, church outings, baseball practice, school meetings -- all were juggled by the 41-year-old working mother, who tried to commit her four children's schedules to memory or put them on scraps of paper stuffed in her purse.

Pennington sometimes forgot details. A few times, she drove to the wrong baseball field for her son's games. This month, she showed up for a church meeting an hour early.

"She ran the house, so if she forgot, we were in trouble," her husband, Ray Pennington, said.

The Penningtons are the kind of busy American family that Apex company Go Mom Inc. wants to reach.

In September, Go Mom will release a new line of planning and organizing tools that aim to simplify family life. The company's founder and only employee, Molly Gold, is a mother of three who lives in Apex.

Gold left her job as a meeting planner to become a stay-at-home mother in 1995. An obsessive organizer -- as a student, she used the same color pen in the same color notebook -- Gold tried to bring that kind of order to her home life.

In 2000, she created a planner that has family-oriented supplements, such as carpool schedules, menu planners, medical summaries and coach's numbers.

"There are plenty of products out there for a woman managing a work schedule," Gold said. "But there was nothing that addressed the priorities of mothering. That's where we cut our niche."

Using loans from friends and relatives, she started her business. After consulting a designer and holding focus groups with neighborhood mothers, she created the planner that she sold on her Web site, www.GoMomInc.com. In two years, the orders became too much to handle, and Gold approached MeadWestvaco Consumer and Office Products about a licensing agreement.

The company picked up the planners for nationwide distribution at Target stores in 2004.

The planner's concept captures the layers of the working mother's world, said Susan Douglas, a communications professor at the University of Michigan who studies cultural perceptions of motherhood.

"One of the very under-appreciated aspects of being a working mother is all of the anticipation you have to do: the mental planning, the psychological work," Douglas said. "How are you going to integrate your work day and housework with your child's day? You constantly have to work ahead and foresee how those schedules are going to intersect. That's a lot of work."

Women spend twice as much time taking care of children and more hours doing household chores than men, according to a 2004 American Time Use survey.

Most parents work 60 to 75 or more paid and unpaid hours a week, said Theodore Greenstein, an associate professor of sociology at N.C. State University, who examines family issues.

"The obvious result is stress and anxiety, trying to adjust work time to take the kid to baseball practice," Greenstein said.

If all the work was compensated, it would amount to a decent living. Salary.com has estimated a stay-at-home mother's work at $134,121 by adding up her roles as housekeeper, day care teacher, cook and others. A working mother would earn $85,876 in addition to her work salary, the compensation Web site estimated.

The Go Mom planners are geared toward both working and stay-at-home mothers with children of various ages.

Gold plans to start a family-schedule coaching service this fall in conjunction with the release of three new Go Mom products this year: a wall calendar, home organizer and school organizer to be sold in Office Depot and Staples. Gold declined to reveal sales or earnings, citing proprietary issues.

In a segment for NBC's 'Today' show scheduled to air during this morning's 8 a.m. hour, Gold shares time-saving tips with the Penningtons, helping them organize their schedules and find more leisure time together.

Her suggestions include having in-and-out boxes to circulate permission slips and other documents; communal family message boards; a wall calendar that centralizes the family's schedule; chore charts and a planner.

The Penningtons took Gold's advice and got a Go Mom planner -- which Jeannine Pennington calls her Bible -- in which she keeps track of her family's schedule. "It's infusing a lot of tried-and-true things that work in the business world into the family," said Ray Pennington, an insurance claim director.

A year ago, his wife rejoined the work force as a teaching assistant at a local elementary school. Pennington described her school year as "very overwhelming." She juggled her job and the needs of her four children, ages 9 to 15, who all had sports practices, games and extracurricular activities.

The Penningtons said their stress level has declined since they got more organized. By using the planners and schedules, the Penningtons say they have reserved some weekend hours for relaxing.

"I've freed up my mind from trying to remember everything up there," Jeannine Pennington said. "It's not a life-altering change, but it's definitely a change."