One Thing at a Time

This post is part of a series of posts I'm doing about our journey in home management and homeschooling. You can find the first post and links to the rest of the posts here.

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It had all caught up with me: the chaos, the lack of organization and planning. It felt a little like drowning; but how to get my head above water?

I decided early on that I would start with one thing.

I think where I had gone wrong before was trying to do a complete overhaul all at once. I wanted things to be fixed the next day! But two or three days into a new system, I would be overwhelmed and quit.

So I started with one thing. You might think that we started by planning the big picture first: things like making a calendar and planning the following school year. As it turned out though, it was a lot more necessary for us to deal with the everyday chaos. We don't really have a lot of outside activities yet (ballet, t-ball and the like). Other than the occasional doctor appointment or play date, we are mostly at home. So the calendar on my smart phone (with its alerts and notifications) is about all I need to keep track of that stuff. Neither did I need to plan a lot for our homeschool year because the curriculum I was using pretty much did that for me.

Since it was summer and we weren't schooling, I decided to start by establishing daily and weekly routines that would help during the school year and work out from there.

Little by little, things got better. We established routines for a typical day, for getting ready in the morning at at night, for cleaning the house. I learned to plan everything from our meals to our homeschool week. Our kids grew more and more independent, taking charge of cleaning up their messes, household chores, and even some of their schoolwork.

The cumulative effect of all this has been dramatic. There is still always more to do and lots of chaos (which is normal with little kids to some extent), but we are far more equipped for the task now. I do sometimes (ok, often) get behind, but we are never quite so far from order as we once were. The result is that we are able to do this thing that we know is right for our kids, and that I am less overwhelmed.

Taking care of a family with four little kids is still demanding work and I am still stretched thin, but things are so much better. I now (most of the time) feel like my head is above water.