We’ve been extra diligent about getting up on time and starting school on time.  This year.

And yet – school is taking a loooong time lately.  I mean, that’s normal.  It’s fine.  I have two high school students and one middle schooler and two elementary students and that all just equals a lot of educating and computer sharing and mom-help-needing.

Add in work and teaching at Meadowlark and I don’t know how to manage it all mostly.

I was laughing with a couple other families after church on Sunday about busy schedules and meals in the car between karate and soccer practices and whatever it is your family is into.  And, the crazy part is, this season we aren’t even playing any sports.  And it’s still feeling jam packed.  Is there a solution? I don’t even know.

I did streamline the kids’ chores when we moved to our new house.  And it’s been helpful.  I made a list of five sets of chores and the kids just rotate through them on various weeks.  That way I don’t have to rethink the chore chart each week, I can just switch out the person doing that particular set.  And, thankfully, our new house already had a chalkboard wall.  Perfect – right?  I mean, what’s a Keigley house without chalkboard walls?  And on Saturday, you do these chores but you do extra per room.  Like – Saturday you actually scrub the floor or wash the windows, whereas all week you could just sweep the floor and not wash windows daily.  It helps keep the gross at bay, even if a nine year old is doing the cleaning.

I also have developed a basic routine over the many years of homeschool – I cannot even begin to believe that London is in TENTH grade and only has two more years left after this one.  But whatever, I’m definitely not talking about that right now.

Instead of scheduling down to the hour or the minute, which I used to do – and frankly, which used to work when I was more in control of outside influences, the environment, nap time and even playdates and snacks and, you know, everything – now I have fully embraced the notion of blocks.  Block scheduling.  I created a few blocks in our day – blocks where I do certain subjects in a specific order and I know that the block itself is generally an hour or less in time.  And I don’t demand exactly when those blocks will occur – although I have a general idea and usually they fall at regular intervals.  For example, we have a history block.  It’s not all history, but history is the cornerstone of that hour so that’s what it was named.  And during the history block we do our history lesson (of course) and then a poem we read together, next we have a time the kids share from what they’ve been reading and then we finish up with the Latin lesson.  This is just about the only block we all do as an entire family anymore.  The rest of the subjects are so various per grade now, but I love to have a small part of every day where we learn collectively as a family and history is easy to work that together.  The block idea helps a lot because it could be accomplished in the afternoon – or even the evening if life was unpredictable that day.  And it’s a conquerable chunk of time.

These systems help a mother out, for sure.  But goodness, there’s still so much mayhem, isn’t there?

Oh – and I also always (almost) make meal plans because I can NOT handle the stress of 5 o’clock decisions about food and I like the answers to my kids’ continual “what’s for dinner” to be written in plain sight.

What are your favorite ways to organize your home or your cleaning or your day?  Or your work load/work flow?  Especially stay at home/work from home moms.  Give me all your tips to manage time better because it feels like I get up early to get an hour of work in before school starts and then I work in the afternoons and then I work after kids go to bed and it pretty much seems like what I do is WORK.

_________________________________________