Here’s the common situation: A super smart friend, let’s call her Julie, who always has easy cooking shortcuts when I go to her house, posted a question on Facebook asking about family dinner ideas. I remember that I loved at least five of the ideas Julie’s friends shared in the comments, but now I can’t remember a single one of them. This was four weeks ago so where is that Facebook thread again? Although the site can reconnect me with my 7th grade boyfriend, it doesn’t allow my to search my own posts.

If only I could search Julie’s page for “Parmesan”.  Or Lisa T’s page for “book club”. Or Kim’s page for “restaurant”. And now I can, with Diggity.

Both a website and an app, Diggity digs through your own instances of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It’s currently in beta, so it might not be perfect.

But here’s the magic: if you know what you were looking for was from a certain person or maybe one of three or four people — this is how mom’s brains work, right? it was totally, definitely, probably someone from Book Club who posted a discount code for a hotel in Santa Cruz — you can filter the search by person, or even by page, meaning a group or a brand that you follow.

This screenshot shows how I could track down that post about life-changing nursing sweatshirts that I know came from Ain’t Know Mom Jeans. Found it!

And one more thing. For more memorable moments, you can create “Shoeboxes”, which are curated buckets of the content you want to come back to or keep forever. For example, “Baby’s First Year” could be made of posts from your profile, your baby’s other parent, and anyone else who is likely to be sharing content you want to save in that Shoebox.

Say you’re Kim Kardashian. You could create a fabulous Shoebox of “Crap the media said about me while I was pregnant.”

Which of these two uses is more compelling to you: 1) searching for reference info you wanted to remember OR 2) safekeeping special social media content?

My friends sent this one out to celebrate their daughter’s first birthday. Sense of humor, yes?

Remember, do what YOU want to do and the rest will fall in line.

First comes love, then come marriage, then comes baby, and then another baby, and then HOLY HELL what happened to us?

When I was about to take my first maternity leave, a senior executive at the company where I worked called me into her office and then got misty-eyed as she told me how magical the first month with a new baby is for two new parents to share.  She described awesome joy and pride and compared it to a second honeymoon. My husband had planned to take four weeks off from work, and I’m so glad he did.  We were so pleased with ourselves and even though I felt like I had been run over by a truck between my C-Section recovery and my excruciating nursing pain, I felt the love for my husband that had been predicted by that veteran mom. When I tell expectant moms about it now, I get teary-eyed myself. It’s an amazingly special feat to create a child together and enjoying that bond is truly a great pleasure.

When my second child was a fussy newborn, the honeymoon– and paternity leave– was shorter. My husband had the same compassion and sensitivity for my recovery and renewed job as a mama cow, but with a two-and-a-half-year old in the mix, I spent more time thinking about him as another set of hands than as a fantastic guy that I had chosen to marry. I suddenly started to suspect that all the times I heard my own divorced parents and other divorced parents say, “It is not about you,” to their child, might not be entirely true. How could it not be? Children impact a marriage. Even if they’re not a strain, they’re certainly a distraction, and if we don’t acknowledge that, we’re in serious denial.

It’s never surprising to me when a reader or friend, especially one with kids under four years old, asks what strategies will help keep a relationship on track during the most intense, hectic child-rearing years. When such a question came in recently, I was inspired to share some wise words from our friend Asha of Minimalist Parenting.  She made this video for Kids in the House and I think it offers some great perspective: Tips for maintaining a strong marriage while parenting.

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Geeky moms and dads need to leave the house too, right? While I love seeing you here on the blog, I want you to get fresh air and sunshine. If you need someone to give you some points for your effort, try one of these apps to gamify your outings. Geo-location apps turn walks with baby into a scavenger hunt. Nerdy parents will love to use foursquare, ingress, or geocaching apps to take their love of video games into the great outdoors.

1. foursquare. For adults with or without kids, wherever you go.
   Use your phone to “check in” to various real-world places whenever you arrive. If you visit one place often enough, you will become the mayor. You can also earn badges of honor for achieving different milestones in the game such as checking in 10 times in a day or going to 5 different movie theaters. Using the social features, you can find out which of your friends is nearby, share tips with each other, and leave photographs of your experience. I don’t know why I’m soooo very into it; there’s no practical application (aside from my documented obsession of data for its own sake!). As of this writing, I have more than 3,000 check-ins and a dozen mayorships.
   Get foursquare in the iTunes app store or Google play store.
2. Geocaching. For parents and kids alike, exploring for treasure.
   Use your phone (or an old fashioned website) to find hidden caches of miniature bits and bobs. I’ll admit that I’ve never done this, but I think it sounds really fun for just the right sort of geeky family. Shiloh tells us all about geocaching with her big pregnant belly and little infant sidekick and Whitney describes her family’s experience with geocaching including some smartphone apps.
   This Groundspeak Geocaching app is about $10 in either the iTunes app store or the Google play store but comes highly recommended.
3. Ingress. For parents and big kids, capturing specific locations.
   For Android phone users only, Ingress is an “augmented reality” game where you have to walk to different “portals” in your area/town. These portals are actually real landmarks, sculptures, and other public, historic or artistic sites, that you may never have noticed before. The goal is to capture these portals for your team, and link them together. The game requires you to be physically near these locations, so it gets you out walking and seeing new and unique landmarks in your local area. The game theme is pretty nerdy though: the two teams are the Enlightenment, who are welcoming new alien technology to the earth, and the Resistance, who are against the aliens. You choose either side to begin, and then your allegiance doesn’t change. My husband and eight year-old go walking for hours each weekend to play this game.
   Request an invite at http://www.ingress.com.

These are the geo apps we’re using. Do you have a geeky guilty pleasure that gets you out into the real world? Do tell!

Follow the hashtag #babeinamug on Instagram and you’ll quickly see that this is a Thing.

Thanks to the clever blogger MommyShorts, who composed the collage above, babies and mugs are being photographed with this perspective trickery — and shared on social media.

If you are able to capture such a shot and participate in this #babeinamug meme, please tag us, too, so we can see your cute babe in a mug! (@rookiemoms or #rookiemoms). Post your photos on twitter, Instagram, or on the Facebook page of MommyShorts.

Our friend Kelly posted this one today.

Since my kids are already at school (and much older) I had to use this paper doll of Scarlett, which means that my cleverness is hardly worth noting as she was already cup-sized!

Head over to Instagram and follow @MommyShorts or explore the tag #babeinamug!

Reader Alana shared a terrific tip for keeping an at-home date night creative for less than five bucks:

Head over to the thrift store and buy a few new board games. Play with your partner after your baby goes to bed. Done and done.

Nala’s games were all half off at the thrift store

She added a favorite family recipe of Fettuccine Alfredo to the date. When I try this assignment over the weekend, I plan to add a fancy dessert (I would do anything for Whole Foods’ chocolate cream pie) turning the grand total of the date from about $5 into about $11.

Please share your fun at-home date night ideas with us in the comments!

On giggle.com, where we contribute a couple of times each month, an article about baby names caught my eye: 22 Baby Naming Rules Worth Following.

The “rules” were submitted by parents who were surveyed, and most make sense to me. See: No yooneek spellings.  Name your son (or daughter) Peyton or even Payton.  But not Peighton, Patyn, or Paitynne.

Rule #3 is the one I broke when we chose the names Julian and Scarlett just because we liked them: A first name should ideally embody some kind of meaning.  That might be family or ethnic significance, literal meaning, or even that you’ve loved it since you were seven.  A name with meaning is going to have more staying power than one you choose simply because it’s attractive.

Here’s another good one: Don’t let anyone pressure you into or out of a name.  It’s the Number 1 reason behind baby name regret.

And this one I may have followed subconciously, but I never actually did the math: Ideally, first, middle, and last names will be unequal numbers of syllables. So 3-1-2 tends to work better than 2-2-2. (My son is 3-1-3 and my daughter is 2-1-3, while I am 2-4-1. I think those of you who have one-syllable last name probably were more aware of this.)

Read all the rules of baby naming over on Giggle>

My own submission this month fell under the theme of budget conscious: 5 Easy Ways New Moms Can Pay it Forward — Saving Time and Money.

And stay tuned to the Giggle GAB blog for Heather’s upcoming post about hand-me-downs. With three boys, and a degree in engineering, she can figure this out if anyone can.

Telling you what’s on Giggle each month is part of our duties as contributors there. If you’d like to get to know their offerings, check out the shop.

My daughter has a wonderful knack for inventing words. “Waggy”, if you don’t know, is an adjective that describes wide-leg pants, such as men’s-styled pajama bottoms. On Pajama Day at preschool, you might think twice about wearing your waggy jammies, because if you want to climb a lot, they may get in your way.

All kids say the darndest things, of course. And all parents forget those things pretty quickly.

Enter technology.

Storybots has a new app called KidQuoter that invites you to capture (and share) the memorable things your children say. You create a profile for each child, including their picture and age. When you add a quote, the app generates a cartoon-ish digital postcard that displays the quote with the child’s picture name and specific age, ie 5 years 8 months, at the time you entered it.

You can change the background color of the image, store multiple faces for each kid, and change their outfit before you save it. It makes for a really cute image, but like all JibJab ecards, the photo you uploaded is just the child’s face; the costumes and headgear are fun illustrations. For my daughter especially, I wish there was a way to include her hair.

Once you save the image, you can easily share it on Facebook, Twitter or in an email that will automatically have the subject line “{Child’s Name} said…” My husband was away this weekend and I definitely had my ears pricked up to send him funny things the kids said. Alas, the children are simply not charming and funny all the time. If you like to send your partner updates throughout the day, this is a cute way to execute it.

This app is free, and if your child is nearing two, I think it’s time to start writing down what she says.  The mornings on which she requests “breffaxt” won’t last forever.

Expectant parents can create a time-lapse video of their pregnancy – and get health tips along the way – through a new, free, interactive iPhone app called CineMama available from the March of Dimes.

Watch your belly grow as you take as many or as few pictures as you like over the course of your pregnancy.

The press release for this was targeted at women, reading “CineMama allows expecting moms to take and upload their photos to the web, easily turn the still pictures into a video, and share it all through social media, such as Facebook and Twitter,” but it seems obvious to me that partners should put the app on their phone, as they will be the one taking the pictures.

More details on iTunes >

The teeny tiny bubble wrap is perfect as a physical outlet for moms trying not to scream at their kids. (Confession: I have done this dozens of times)

This is how it works:

1. Get frustrated or annoyed to the point of wanting to scream.
2. Gently, set baby in crib or other safe place.
3. Walk over to the desk with the little bubble wrap.
4. Squeeze and pop until everything is funny again.

I learned this little trick from a post-partum stress class, so it must be true, right? Ripping tissues should also work but won’t have that satisfying snap-snap sound.

You guys, this app is really cute — and it’s free!

Endless Alphabet teaches letters, and for those who already know them, introduces words. The animations are filled with charming monsters (not scary at all!) and quirky sounds. I like the artwork which will appeal to both genders.

I cannot vouch for the efficacy of the method by which spelling is taught. (Anything that comes out of LeapFrog, for example, is rigorously designed for real learning, while plenty of folks just like to put out games with A, B, Cs embedded in them, based on no educational research.) But I don’t think it can hurt.

Enjoy! (You can click here for the iTunes page or just search for Endless Alphabet in the app store on your device.)

In about ten minutes, you can make someone feel loved for Valentine’s Day. Here are five fresh ideas for you using stuff you probably have around the house:

1. Mix up a love potion

Follow the tasty (and fast) instructions from the lovely Marie at makeandtakes. Serve your love for breakfast, snack or dessert.

2. Turn your baby into a conversation heart

Got construction paper and a cute baby? Now you just need a sense of humor and your camera to make a funny conversation heart greeting. When creativity is failing, Love ya! works.

3. Crank out some decorations

If you have paper or fabric scraps, you can make quickie hearts to hang about the room. It really sets the tone for your daytime date.

4. (Heart) someone or something

All you need is a Sharpie and a plain white tee to make your baby be the bearer of your message of love. See instructions for speedy onesie customizing.

5. Have sex or something like it

If you don’t have time for a full-on session of making whoopie, might we suggest the “5 minute fix” from Babyproofing Your Marriage? If that’s not to your liking, there are many other great sexy, fast, and easy ideas from Kristen Chase’s sexual resolution (like wear a thong, make a sexy playlist, or give a massage).

Now, I really hope that someone is planning an eleven minute surprise that will knock your socks off!

Photos: delicious smoothie: Marie; Conversation heart: reader who wishes to remain nameless; Fabric hearts: Whitney; Heart onesie: Thompson Tribune.