This past couple months I have been learning what it means to 'manage a house'. In the past I only remember the term being used in Jane Austen movies, or maybe once or twice by a professor's wife when we were living in Kentucky. I am not very good at thinking far ahead and doing thorough planning. I like to plan, but I also like to change the plans, a lot. This has not been working well lately. Realizing that it is 5:00pm and we need to eat dinner in a half hour, however I don't have the chicken I was going to use because I didn't feel like buying it when I was last at the market, thinking I would just 'wing it' later. This is not a good feeling, and it has been happening often. Or, it is time for the kids to meet with their language tutor and I didn't prepare an activity for them so have them use the play food, again, for the 3rd time that week. Ugh! Not good use of their time, nor the tutor's time.
So, I have begun planning, and have attempted to manage my household in a similar way to how I planned my schedule when I was a teacher, or when I worked in the electrical engineering office (for a bunch of schedulers). We now have a schedule on the refrigerator that lists every meal for the next 8 days, along with what needs to be purchased the day before from the market, and what needs to be prepared beforehand for that meal. It also has a place for listing the things that need to be purchased on Wednesdays from the supermarket and what I need to call on and have delivered to our home. Next to that schedule is a schedule of what needs to be cleaned each day. We now have a househelper. (Thanking Father daily for this provision! More on this in a later post.) She takes care of most of the cleaning, and shopping. Then I have two shelves in the bookcase, one for homeschool for the week and one for the kids' language tutor time for the week, and a blue 3-ring binder with the schedule for each (combined since they are happening at the same time). On Friday and Saturday I plan out the entire next week, schedule, meals, homeschooling, tutor times for the 3 kids, and then I prep whatever I can ahead of time. For homeschool and tutor time, all the prep is placed on the shelves, in bags, ready to grab.
System is still not great, but we are getting there. This past week I had a lot less of those, "oh-no, I don't have any more diapers!", or similar, moments. It definitely makes my time with kids and Jared a whole lot better when I am 'managing the household' well. Instead of spending my evening trying to put together something for breakfast the next morning, I can now have a conversation with my husband, because the preparation was done the day before. Or, instead of having Josiah doing his local school homework at 8:00pm when he, and I, are worn out, we got it done at 4:00 pm because I had it on the schedule that that is what comes next in the day.
I am looking forward to sharing some of our recent stories and happenings. I have missed keeping in touch these past months.
I will finish off this post with one of the most awesome gifts from my husband.
Our living room used to look like this:
No comments:
Post a Comment