New Schedule

Change, change, change. It seems my life, and therefore my schedule, are constantly changing! For a girl who is a big planner and likes to know what it going to happen next month not just tomorrow, constant change can be a bit unnerving. With both of my helpers in college and working part-time, I'm losing the larger portion of my workforce. The one left at home is still finishing up school for the year and is allergic to hard work.Which leaves me with only one worker - me! :) (Although on the plus side that means everything will be done the way I want it done. lol)

I am working on putting a new plan in place - started this morning - that I am hoping will lend a little structure to all of this change. Each day has an assigned task, that way if I miss a day there will only be one thing left undone and I can, hopefully, catch up with that thing the next week. As long as laundry day isn't what is missed, everything should be fine. Not necessarily as clean and tidy as I like things to be but livable.


Most summers, especially by August, once it is too hot to be outside all day, I work on organizing, clearing clutter and getting everything into good shape to start the new school year. But, this summer, we have a very heavy schedule and a lot to do in order to send our oldest son off to college. Organizing may have to wait until Fall when I have more time. (At least I hope I'll have more time!)

Building Project

This week is finals week for two of our adult children. Then they have a week of Spring Break. My husband has taken the same week off work so that he and the children can spend the week building a bedroom in the basement for our oldest daughter. She has been wanting to do this since we moved into our home two years ago and we finally have the time and money to do it. We are all very excited.

By moving her to the basement she gains more privacy since her brothers' room is upstairs and we gain an open bedroom to use for foster care. She also gets to paint the room the color she wants. Her current bedroom has pink carpet - which she hates - so she couldn't paint the walls blue which is her favorite color.

My husband has set up an appointment with a friend who owns a truck to go to the lumber yard and purchase the materials on Friday afternoon. I am hopeful that we will be able to finish the room early in the week and be able to work on the goat pen that needs to be built before our Nigerian Dwarf whether comes home.

Exercise

One of my goals for this year (2012) is to be healthier. I am planning to exercise, control portion sizes, eat 5 servings of fruits and veggies and drink 8 glasses of water per day.

The Plan
My goal is to walk three days a week and do strength training three days a week. That will leave one day a week free to either do whatever exercise I want to do or give me one day when I can skip exercising if I don't have the time to do it. As a busy mom of three, there are many days when time gets away from me and I don't finish my list for the day so a flex day each week will help save my sanity.

I am going to start slowly and make small increases each week. I am going to start walking 15 minutes each day and hopefully work up to an hour. I will add in strength training later, once again starting at an easy level and slowly increasing.

This Week
This week I am going to start implementing the exercise portion of my plan. I will be walking on my treadmill at least three times this week. I will be walking for 15 minutes on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Tuesdays and Thursdays this quarter we spent most of our day on campus so I have a very small window of time to get everything done that I need to do. I have scheduled a half-hour after lunch for exercise so that gets finished first before I get side-tracked by housework.

Color Coding

"Did you look at the calendar?" That is a question my family hears often! We have a big dry-erase calendar on the wall between our kitchen and dining room. Each person is responsible for putting their activities on the calendar in their color. (Dry erase markers are kept in a jar under the board to make this easy.) What do I mean by "their color"? Each member of the family has been assigned a color and their events are written on the calendar in that color. This saves space on the calendar, time and stress by making it easy to identify who needs to be where and when. When something is written in black then that means more than one person has to be there so you better know if that includes you or not. :)

The calendar is not the only thing in our house that is color coded. Notebooks, folders, and even towels are bought in the right color for each person. If you left your stuff where it doesn't belong, Mom is going to know who is responsible!

We have done this for years and I never really even thought about it - it just made sense to do it that way to me - until a friend was commenting on what a great idea it was. Who knew?

If you're interested in trying it out, the first step is to buy dry-erase markers and/or pens in enough colors for each member of your family and black. I buy a pack of 6 Bic dry-erase markers and picked up a pack of 6 pens at Staples. If your family is small enough one of those pens with 4 colors in it would be wonderful. Then using the colors you have assign each family member a color. In our house, Daniel is green, I am purple (my favorite color!), Amira is red, Levi is orange and Jacob is blue. I keep the pens and a calendar in my purse so I can write down appointments when I'm not home. The markers sit in a jar on the counter beside the big calendar. (I also have a calendar program (cozi.com) on my phone that will do the same thing as the one in my purse - only problem is I can't enter an appointment while I'm on the phone.)

Everyone in the house knows the rule: "If it isn't on the calendar, it isn't happening!" This helps keep me sane. If someone forgets to put an activity they want to do on the calendar, they are out of luck and don't get to do it. Natural consequences work much better than a yelling mom. :)