The following is a guest post from our sponsor, P&G HYTTY.

As a mom, I’m sure you know all too well the need to take on many different roles or “hats” to ensure your family has everything they need day in and day out. Whether it’s being the family “doctor,” “chef,” or “accountant” in addition to “Mom,” finding product solutions that improve life’s daily demands are MUST-DOs on your never ending TO-DO list! If only you had insider access to discovering ways to get the job done right the FIRST time around, ultimately helping to transform life’s daily demands for the better ... Sound too good to be true?

Remember the days when the toilet was used for one thing? Well, two things, I suppose, but, one theme. The other day, as I was conducting a conference call while hiding out in the bathroom, it hit me how multi-functional that room has become.

Does this look familiar to anyone else?

During cold and flu season, most of us know to swipe the kitchen counter with an antibacterial wipe and clean our faucet handles frequently. But germs lurk in some surprising places, and despite those precautions, you still might be missing a major source of viruses and bacteria that could make you sick.

If you want to reduce the chances of your family catching a cold and/or the flu this year, follow these six easy steps to germ-proof your house:

A man staying in a low-cost motel in Charlotte, North Carolina, found that his room was out of toilet paper. His rage-filled reaction -- causing $2,000 in damages to both his and a nearby room -- is being characterized as crazy by most news sites reporting it. Never mind that the guy is living in a no-tell motel reserved for the homeless and those living on the fringes, like the place where the guys kept house on My Name Is Earl. I seriously doubt if the whole place is worth $2,000. But even if it were a Holiday Inn, I can think of a lot of situations in which this is a perfectly normal response.What could lead a man to such a desperate reaction to a lack of tee pee?

While fall has many wonderful aspects -- warm, sunny days coupled with cozy, cool nights; dappled sunlight; crisp, changing leaves; apple orchards; football; hay rides ... I could go on and on -- there is one downside. No matter how much you like cooler weather, at some point, you just have to close the windows and lose the powerful air-freshening aspect of, well, fresh air. And given that we tend to enjoy spending more time indoors in the fall, pet odors, kid messes, sports equipment, and generally stale air become really obvious really quickly.

If a good cleaning doesn't improve matters as much as you'd like, it's time to take out the home fragrances to make the air inside your house smell as good as the air outside.

Do you love your home? Do you love it enough to marry it? Well, if you do (or even if you don’t -- yet), you’ll soon be able to drape your domicile in bedding and bath products from the legendary wedding dress and skate costume designer Vera Wang. But here’s the thing: Though I appreciate the elegance of her wedding ensembles, I find Vera Wang's home décor collection, which I checked out last weekend at Kohl’s, to be a bit too subdued. In fact, I don’t want to marry my home, wedding-style; I want to be married to it every day, which means it has to hold my interest, and consistently be new and exciting. With few exceptions, Simply Vera Wang is too … simple. So here are five designers I would prefer to have gussying up my habitat:

The East Coast may be in the middle of the floodpocalypse, but the South is still suffering through some of the worst drought conditions on record.Even when there’s no shortage, saving water is just good policy. As a child, I used to watch my dad shave. Rather than running the water over his razor to rinse it, he would fill the sink with water and swish the razor through at top speed. He said that serving in the Navy taught him how precious water is. “Why don’tcha save some for the fish,” he’d mutter, if I was letting the tap run too long. We could all stand to preserve a few drops this summer. Here are some tips for saving water at home. Some are strange, some are easy, and some will save you buckets of cash on your water bill, for reals.

On the one hand, Gwyneth Paltrow’s recent list of things she "can’t live without" in Elle Decor sort of stretches the limits on the idea of "can’t." A retro handset for her BlackBerry shouldn’t really occupy the same mental space as, like, her pancreas. On the other hand, one of the things she lists is a bathtub in her bedroom, and she’s been catching a certain amount of flak for that. But Gwyneth is a New Yorker, and every true New Yorker has been in an updated tenement with a bathtub in the kitchen. I’d even go so far as to say you shouldn’t call yourself a New Yorker if you haven’t eaten dinner off a plywood bathtub cover. Of course, I say that from San Francisco, but my point still stands.