Some of you may be familiar with my friend Jenn’s gaming blog, Aggroqueen. Basically, Jenn’s whole family was heavily involved in the online game World of Warcraft, and since she couldn’t beat them, she joined them.

My husband is also a WoW disciple, and now that my older daughter is reading, he has introduced her to the cult community. I’ve joked about how if she had a gaming blog like Jenn’s, it would be called Aggrotot. But while I like it that she can follow the game and understands the concepts of completing quests and exchanging currency for goods, I’m still a little put off by some of the adult themes (read: violence) in the game.

So when one of my fellow PBN bloggers was unable to try out the new Knowledge Adventure game - JumpStart World - because it’s unfortunately not Mac-compatible, I have to admit I was excited to become her stand-in. She mailed her CD to me, I received it yesterday, and it went directly from mailbox to CD-ROM drive. Other than a brief overnight respite, my daughter has been glued to the PC, and instead of killing mythical creatures, she’s completing learning games and missions. She LOVES this game.

Even more impressive, the version we received is the second grade one (she’s in kindergarten), and while she’s run into a few hurdles she couldn’t quite leap on her own, she’s (forgive the expression) kicking ass and taking names - which makes her feel like a real big shot. I honestly can’t even tell you how far she’s progressed because she won’t stop playing long enough to let me check out the game for myself, but she and my husband have already told me that we need to subscribe so that she can get more adventure packs*.

While I love that she’s taking a break from WoW, I’m even happier that she’s showing such excitement for learning. She loves going to school and loves asking me millions of questions on every topic from human anatomy to world history. We’re thrilled to encourage her natural curiosity outside the context of formal education, and JumpStart World is one more great way to do that. It’s going to be a perfect diversion for her over the upcoming holiday break, which makes it an ideal holiday gift too.

*The CD and first two adventure packs are $19.95, available for grades K-2. But if you’d rather give it a test whirl before buying, check out the free trial option instead. I’m betting you and your child will be hooked.

You wouldn’t know it now, but I had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the digital age.  An unpleasant experience with coding in my freshman year of college convinced me that technology was evil.

Fast forward fifteen years, and now I debug HTML with a minimal amount of cursing.  Strange days, indeed.

But while I’ve never fully embraced the capabilities of PDAs like my old Blackberry or my cell phone, and Kyle and I used his Palm Pilot primarily to play Dope Wars (and I will forever and ever be the top scorer!), the project manager in me loves the idea of organizing my world even more so than it is already.

Cozi Central is a free organizational software product pioneered by some former Microsoft employees.  You can use it to set up and modify family schedules, task lists, shopping lists, and even upload pictures.  Finally, everyone can be on the same page - literally.

Although it’s going to take more time for us to fully integrate Cozi into our lifestyle, I can already see plenty of ways in which we can take advantage of its capabilities.  For example, collaborating on the grocery list will be a tremendous help for us.  I also think we could use the calendar for meal planning, which goes hand in hand with grocery shopping.  That may not sound like a big deal to you, but figuring out what to have for dinner - and assessing whether we have the right ingredients - is a recurring challenge for us.

Our family schedule hasn’t yet become too unmanageable, but it soon will be.  My older daughter starts kindergarten in a few months, and with school comes a plethora of details to track - not to mention the logistics of drop-off and pick-up, and pre-school for my younger daughter, and remembering which nights Kyle works late, and I haven’t even begun to consider my own schedule yet.  Hey, maybe if we mothers input all the tasks that we handle each day, our husbands would see how busy we really are!

Speaking of tasks, that’s another feature of Cozi Central that we can really use - creation and management of task lists.  There’s always a million things that need to be done, and even though you can keep a grocery list on the refrigerator, it’s not so easy to maintain a task list that way.  You’ll probably head out to get the groceries within a week at the most, but some of those big tasks can take months to finish.  Cozi allows you to keep track of them without cluttering up the refrigerator or forgetting to finish what you started six months ago.

You may not think you need organizational software, but Cozi is free - so why not give it a try?  And give yourself a month or so to play with it and find new ways to make it fit your needs.  You just may find that you’re using your cell phone for more than Tetris and texting your partner to bring home another bottle of wine.

Cozi Central can be downloaded from their home page - the PC version requires XP with Service Pack 2, and Macs can use the web access version of Cozi.

Check out more reviews of Cozi Central, sponsored by The Parent Bloggers Network!