What Our House Looks Like...

This is what the house looks like after 5 days of Christmas parties, never being home because your visiting family and dealing with a teething toddler and sick Daddy.

It has required 1 hour of washing dishes, 3 loads of laundry (so far), trying to find places to put all of our new stuff while also going through all of our old stuff and getting rid of boxes and bags full, coffee and really loud music and we are starting to look clean again. :-)

 The past few weeks I've been trying to organize other areas of our day once we got our schedule all figured out. The "schedule" is working pretty well, we only really stick to it on lesson days though, the other days are much more relaxed and more go with the flow type of days. I do like to use it occasionally on other days and sometimes we just look at it to see what we can do with our time. The other areas that I have looked at to start organizing are in the cleaning department and meal prep/how much we are spending at the grocery store.
 I did print off a weekly cleaning schedule from http://listplanit.com/, but it was to in depth for what my little house needs at the moment. I do use the schedule for ideas but most of the things on it we just do every other week instead of weekly.
 For meals I've made a 2 week menu, pre-approved by Ben with the hopes that he won't spring any ideas on me in the middle of the week on what he is expecting for dinner...like he did tonight. Good thing his mom always has the things that we don't have for what he wants. :-)
 I've planned breakfasts, except for weekends and two full weeks of dinners. This is what it looks like:

Breakfasts -we'll just repeat this for the second week:
Monday: oatmeal- baked or regular
Tuesday: some type of eggs
Wednesday: pancakes
Thursday: coffee cake, or muffins- these will most likely be baked on Wednesday night as we have to be out of the house by 7:45
Friday: cereal

Dinners:
M: Crockpot Beef  Bourguignon- I will use venison in this instead of beef
T: Garlic Lime Chicken with Cilantro Lime Rice (I like lime :-) )
W: Venison Stir Fry
T: Hoppin' John with Salad
F: Pizza
S: Chili
S: Steak, Baked Potatoes
M: Chicken Rice Soup
T: Burritos
W: Cashew Chicken with Rice
T: Spaghetti
F: Pizza
S: Nacho's
S: Chicken Legs, Potatoes and Pea's

Monday's and Thursday's I've tried to make easy dinners, because Ben has basketball practice and dinner needs to be ready when he gets home. Wednesday's I have a little more time to mess around with food since Ben works late. I've included one new recipe to try each week.
 My hope is that we only need to possibly go the store one extra time in these two weeks since we never seem to get out of Plumbs without spending at least $20. I do have a couple things that I wasn't able to get on my shopping trip that I will be getting this week, Ben's Grandma is bringing us "good" cheese from the Amish cheese house over where she lives and we need to go get some apples for snacks. Nelson's fresh apples are way better than anything Meijer or Plumbs ever has.
 Wish me luck!!

Scheduling or planning for a "Steady Day"

 We have tried 2 types of schedules the past couple of weeks. The first used specific times and lasted only 1 day, if that, because I was getting to frustrated when things weren't done by the specified time or they were done way to early. The second uses blocks of time from 20 minutes to 1 1/2 hours, and depending on the day we move blocks around. For example today we had to go to "the meat store" and if you don't get there before 11 in the morning you could be there all day, so we only used two blocks, ran our errands and then finished the others this afternoon after nap.
 So here is what we have so far. :-)

7 AM ~wake up and breakfast, depending on what we are eating that day for breakfast this can last 20 minutes or 1 hour.

30-45 minutes ~ Momma: Bible Study and coffee, possible Internet time, Seth: video.

1 hour ~Momma: clean house and start laundry, Seth: help Momma, free play.

1 1/2 hours ~Momma: walk/run/exercise DVD and shower, Seth: Grandma's/Nana's or "exercise" and shower with Momma.

20 minutes ~Momma: stuctured play with Seth (color, flashcards, read library books, play dough, etc.).

20-45 minutes ~ Play outside if the weather is good or baking time.

45 minutes -1hour ~ Momma: lunch, clean up house and dishes, nap time routine with Seth. Seth: help Momma

 I try to have Seth down for a nap right around 1, that way if he decides to sleep longer than normal he has a good two hours before lessons start at 3:30

Striving for Steady Days

A few weeks ago I got this book in the mail. This isn't the first time that I have read it, but this time I wanted my very own copy.

I found out about this book through one of my favorite blogs. www.keeperofthehome.org at a time when I needed to read some books on time management/organization/mothering. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes from the author Jamie C. Martin.

"I am not a perfect mother. Often I struggle with impatience; sometimes I lack the enthusiasm I long for. I make many mistakes, just like my children. As they are maturing as children, I am maturing as a mother. In any career, experience allows us to grow, improve, and learn. But unlike many professions, many of us mothers have never had any training to prepare us for this new job filled with diapers, tantrums and sleepless nights. We need to equip ourselves with practical tools that allow us to give our best to our young children, helping us thrive is our strengths and overcome our weaknesses. We aim for professionalism in every other area of our lives; why should our children get anything less?"

Speaking of being a contagious mother: "I'm convinced that children also want to be around this positive type of influence. If we don't love what we do as mothers, our children notice quickly, Our attitudes, positive or negative, influence them in a matter of minutes. How can we convey our love for them? By choosing to enjoy the daily tasks we perform, embracing the moments that will never be back again. We can stop what we're doing when the need attention, letting them know how important they are..."

There are four parts to this book broken up into mostly single page chapters. Part one focuses on getting organized and that is the part that I have been focusing on these past few weeks. One of the first things that I wanted to do was to work out a schedule. My goal with this was to: "create a morning routine that will allow me to run or exercise and have the house clean, while also having playtime with Seth before lunch and piano lessons" 

 In the book Jamie gives two different ways of making a schedule: using specific times or using blocks of time. Our first schedule that we tried used specific times, we didn't make it through one day with that one. It felt to confined and I was getting upset when things werent' getting done in their allotted times

 Our second schedule has worked rather well. I used blocks of time ranging from 20 minutes to 1 1/2 hours. This is what we have settled on so far. I'll give you our complete schedule next time.