Planning

I think one of my more important jobs as a parent is to help my children understand how to use their time. Not in the manner I learned, which was to create endless to-do lists of tasks that couldn't be accomplished in one day. The longer the list, the more important I felt. Until the end of the day, that is, when I felt like a complete failure. Keeping with my goal of finding the flow of balance in my life, I'm working to get the kids to take over their own schedules.

Each morning we have a family daily planning meeting. Sometimes it's short, sometimes long. Today we went over what needed to be done by when in order to take a trip to the Field Museum. Small woke everyone up in the night, so we didn't really get rolling until 10:30 or so. Working with the time schedule and priorities, we determined we needed to get our homeschooling and accountable kids tasks done by 12:30 to get to the museum by 1 to leave by 3 and not hit traffic on the way to the gym. That would leave time for playing with friends before dinner when we got home. It was an aggressive schedule and we didn't make it. That, in itself, was a lesson.

Yesterday I made up planner pages for Medium and Large, took them to Office Depot and had spiral bound books made. We've been working with a planner page for a while and came upon one we can life with. The first section is for homeschooling: reading, spelling, vocabulary, writing, math, science, history, art and music. Not very unschool-y, I know, but the kids choose their reading, math topics, science topics, history selection based on what we've read in The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 2: The Middle Ages: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of the Renaissance, Revised Edition ... the World: History for the Classical Child), art and music. They asked for spelling and vocabulary. The second section is for Accountable Kids, the program we use to keep our house and life in order. Next is a section for exercise - they chose what to do and write it in. Then comes activities and classes with the time we need to leave and an Extra section for things like play dates. We are pretty pleased with how it's working so far, and are keeping ourselves open to tweaking it in the future.

It's been a struggle for me to learn to manage my time as an adult. I've never had a good notion of how long something takes to accomplish. I think it should take half an hour to install a ceiling fan, when it takes the better part of a day. This past weekend I never imagined I would have my basement overhaul project 75% complete in just two days, it seemed it would take an overwhelming year of weekends.

I've been working through the The Life Organizer: A Woman's Guide to a Mindful Yearbook by Jennifer Louden. It isn't a planner in the traditional sense of filling out blocks of time, you still use a calendar for that. The book's purpose is to prompt you to focus on what is important to you. It poses questions for each month and week to guide you through to your goals. My favorite weekly circle to fill in is "Let Go Of." I'm not through to that point yet, but am looking forward to it!