Thursday, May 31, 2012

Best Apps for a quick mom break

1. Shop Style - FREE Unless you happen to live near the Mall of America, there's no way you could ever get the breadth of stores that ShopStyle has in one place. The app sells everything – clothes, décor, kid and baby stuff, cosmetics, and shoes from stores like Nordstrom, Pottery Barn, Sephora, Banana Republic, Hanna Anderson – plus 300 more. Not only can you order your daughter a cute little dress while she's dozing in the stroller, but you can nab yourself a cute pair of shoes (and a lamp) while you're at it.
2. Cut the Rope - $0.99 Cut the Rope may not have reached Angry Birdsstatus yet, but it's getting close. This addictive game, mixing strategy and physics (it's not as hard as it sounds), comes as a welcome distraction any time you have a free moment. You wouldn't think that cutting rope would be so entertaining, but it really is!
There's also a free version of the game.
Works on: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad. (While Cut the Rope isn't available yet for Android, a very similar game called Rope Cut is.)
3. Stanza - FREE We know you don't have as much free time as you did pre-kids, but Stanza lets you keep a library of e-books you can chip away at a few pages at a time. It has more than 50,000 titles – recent bestsellers, classics, even a huge selection of free books. Download a bunch and maybe you'll actually read something other than Goodnight Moon tonight. 
There are several other major e-book apps out there, but we like Stanza for its customizable options, like adjusting page margins, line spacing, and coloring. Hey, if you're going to make time to read, you want it to be just the way you want it, right?
4. Long Deep Breathing - $0.99 When's the last time you actually stopped and took a deep breath? It does wonders for your psyche and can help you pull it together when you've got a tantruming toddler on your hands. The app is a simple breathing aid that provides visual cues for inhaling and exhaling. After taking just 10 deep breaths, you'll feel more relaxed and ready to deal with whatever's going wrong – without throwing a tantrum yourself.
Works on: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad (There's a similar app for the Android called Breathe.)
5. Make Up - FREE Let us guess: Some days you dash out of the house only to grimace when you catch a reflection of your disheveled self later on. But you can do better – even if virtually. Upload a photo of your face and get your eye shadow groove on with the endless colors loaded in this app. Once you've got your look right, it tells you what the exact product is. Now you've got some new items for your birthday wish list.
6. Pocket Booth - $0.99 Pocket Booth will take you back to your teen years, when you used to squeeze into one of those little photos booths and take goofy pictures with your friends. The app lets you take a photo (or use an existing one from your camera roll) and turn it into a strip of four pictures. Bring your friends down memory lane by e-mailing them a strip or posting it on their Facebook wall.
7. Tap News - $0.99 Tap News pulls from 18 mainstream news sources, like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and MSNBC, and feeds them into one place. Most of these news outlets have individual apps, yes, but this is a timesaving way to get up to speed on current events. Because, let's face it, sometimes we want to talk about something other than our kids.
8. Island Pictures - FREE Dare to dream about an exotic island getaway with your mate. A trip to Tahiti may not be on the calendar, but drooling over Islands magazine's photos of the most beautiful beaches in the world will take you there for a couple of minutes, at least in your mind.

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