Purpose in the Little Things

Growing up, I loved shopping for school supplies as much as I enjoyed shopping for school clothes. My mom and I would go out and buy all the necessities, of course. And we would always buy me a student planner.

I never used it.

I really wanted to be organized; I spent inordinate amounts of time planning new systems to make it happen. I just never hit upon a system that worked for me, and I never followed through.

I carried my lack of organization into motherhood. By the time I had three children, I was overwhelmed, the house was a wreck, and I still hadn't done much to figure out how to manage it all. We squeaked by, but barely.

And then, in the span of a month, I had my fourth baby and started to homeschooling my eldest daughter. This is when I realized that what I had been doing wasn't going to work anymore. I needed to be running my home, not the other way around. There simply was not a way for me to homeschool my children in chaos.

We coasted through kindergarten. It helped that Ava was already reading at the time. We simply read a lot and did a little math. We figured out what we believed about education. We learned a lot, and by God's grace, we survived.

By last summer, though, it was clear that I was going to have to climb the steep learning curve of home management. We tweaked a little at a time, and now we are at a place where it mostly feels possible to be doing this crazy home education thing. Or maybe even just this life with four children thing.

I'd really like to share a little bit of this journey with you. I'm not a natural homemaker, nor do I have everything figured out. Organization and planning are difficult for me, and there is still a lot of craziness at my house (which I'm convinced is always true to some extent when you have small children). Still, we have learned so much in the past twelve months, changing little thing after little thing. I hope these posts help and encourage other moms, particularly those struggling like I was.

Sometimes what we do as moms feels unimportant and small. But little things can be absolutely vital to the big picture of the ministry that happens in our homes. The little things help us love our families well and create an environment where life and learning can happen. They give discipleship the space it needs to occur. This knowledge fills our days with purpose, even when they are full of what feels like little things.

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This is a series of posts. For ease of navigation, here are links to all the posts in this series! Enjoy!

Post 1: Time Management in the Crazy 
Post 2: One Thing at a Time
Post 3: Morning and Evening Checklists 
Post 4: Daily Routine (and How We Built It) 
Post 5: Homeschool Planning
Post 6: Task Cards and Wall Chart 
Post 7: Independent Work and Assignment Sheet
Post 8: Cleaning Checklist
Post 9: Chores 
Post 10: Getting Kids to Clean Up

Master List of Printables

And because these two topics have also been a huge part of this journey (but I don't want to necessarily re-post them):

This is How We Do It: Meal Planning & Grocery Shopping (now with a printable)
This is How We Do It: Dinner Time & Freezer Cooking