Scheduling Your Day: Mom Sanity

So, pretty much every conversation I've had lately with other mom's has been in whole or in part about this book: Managers of their homes: A practical guide to daily scheduling for Christian homeschool families.

If you haven't heard about it I feel sorry that you are in the dark, but let me enlighten you.  This is probably the best mommy sanity book EVER!!  If you are like most moms and struggle trying to juggle your role as a mother, wife, daughter, sister, maid, employee (for those who work), volunteer and teacher (for us homeschooling moms)...it can be a very daunting!  There are days I want to pull my hair out and then days that I feel so blessed beyond all reason.  The ups and downs up mommy hood, right?  No, it shouldn't have to be that way!

I use to think that I was the only one.  I'd look at other mom's with more kids than my two and wonder how on earth they could have so many and still look so put together.  I only have two and I'm lucky to get a shower most days. Ugh!  How could they look so put together when they have 5 kids, or even more?!

When I started digging down and talking with other mom's I realized that we are all really good at painting a rosy picture of our family.  When is your house the cleanest? When people come over, right?  When are your kids in their finest clothes? When your headed to church, right? Why is it that we have this innate fear of looking like a failure around other people and moms (especially the ones that have so many more kids than I).  Why do we hide? Why does it have to be a secret that we're not perfect?  I mean, nobody is, right?!

In talking to other mom's I also realized that we all have this incredible fear of being a failure as a mom.  We put so much pressure on ourselves to juggle everything that we lose our sanity in the process. Yes, me, the organize queen, the teacher, the hard worker who always had it all together thought I would have no problem popping out 7 kids....yes I, was at my wits end with just two children!  How could this be?!  Well, for a while I just basked in the knowledge of knowing I'm not the only mom who's going insane.  And then I started wondering what the solution was.  What can I change, because something has to!

Enter: 'Managers of Their Homes' by Steven and Teri Maxwell.  This book has been a lifesaver to me.  It came at the perfect time (that would be rock bottom). I really needed someone with lots of children to tell me how they do it, so I, with only my two could do it too!

They go into everything in their book about scheduling their days: homeschooling, chores, naps, babies, priorities, menu planning....almost anything you could think of.  I love how they also quote The Word in their book too.  It is the manual for living, right?

So, I did my priority worksheets and slowly started building my schedule. Although she includes worksheet for schedules I wanted something bigger so I got some unused foam boards out of my craft closet and got to work making a big one.

I started at the building blocks of our schedule with things such as, breakfast, lunch, nap, dinner and bedtime.

More of my notes and ramblings as I was going through this process.

Each person gets their own color.  The schedule is based on half our increments (she explains why in the book). Although I find right now hour blocks seem to work better for us, at least for some things.

My little helper along the way.  This whole time with her was talking about our new schedule and getting her excited for things like chore time and helping mommy cook, etc.  She was ready to start now!

While this is just the start of my total thoughts on this schedule I couldn't resist posting about it so that any other mom's struggling could find it for themselves.  I have told ALL of my friends about this book already because we all seemed to be struggling, some more than other.  But we were all struggling in our own ways. 

I was blessed by my mother in law with this hand me down version but for all of you who aren't so lucky you can check out Managers of their homes: A practical guide to daily scheduling for Christian homeschool families at Amazon for $30 I believe...and to be honest if I had known how much hope and joy this book would bring to my life I would have paid almost anything.  It's that good!!

More posts to come soon on how our schedule is coming!

God Bless!

Heather Joy

Family Handbook

My husband and I had the awesome opportunity to go to Alaska this past September. Ryan had a work conference there, so we decided to make a trip of it since his flight would be taken care of. Since, we lived so far from family we had to call on the grandma's to brainstorm what we could do for our girls to get watched. If you have kids but don't live near family, you know what I mean. It's one thing to leave them with your friends for maybe a day and a weekend if you stretch it but for a whole 10 days? Nope, it just wouldn't happen. Plus, the limited friends we would even consider all have quite a few children themselves. And we didn't want Kara and Emma to be a burden on anyone.

So, my mother volunteered to help watch the girls for part of the time and Ryan's mom and youngest sister offered to come out for the rest. Hallelujah! What a blessing they are to us! At their own expense they chose to come and spend time with their grandchildren so we could have our first time away since our first child was born- 3 years!!

Anyways, so in preparing to leave my children with grandparents who know nothing of our schedule, where things are in our house, the girls' likes and dislikes and not to mention doctors or emergency info...I decided to create The Garcia Family Handbook.

You can see it starts with a simple silhouette picture with all of our family members listed. (Emma is a baby now but I'd rather prepare for the future, so I chose an image that our family can grow into).

The first and most important thing to include was our emergency info. I listed our doctor and her phone number. I listed nearby urgent cares and hospitals that are covered on our insurance. The number of the sheriff and pretty much any other number I could think of, including my two go to people that I could call on for anything. I also made copies of our insurance card and my drivers license, just in case.

Mostly because of this page I have always gotten this handbook out whenever we have sitters watching our girls too!

The next pages list our regular schedule. Both our weekly and daily schedule.

Next, is our nap schedule and rules for putting Kara down since she can sometimes test the boundaries.

This is followed by our night time order and enforcement.

Next is the outings page with a list of ideas of places they could go. I included places, like close parks, jumpy places, our friends' farm, library story time, pet shops (we always look and then buy a handful of cheap treats for our dog) and other places as well.


Here's just some more info and calendars from our regularly visited places or places that we have memberships to: children's museum, gym, etc. That way they could plan to go to storytimes, events and whatever was happening that week.

Here are the pages I put some food suggestions. What the baby can/cannot eat at this point. I also put some likes and dislikes with some meal suggestions. This helped them to know what the girls were used to.

Next were some pages on 'Where is That?' and 'Plants'. I included these pages to make sure all my plants didn't die while we were gone, ha! And because some things I just didn't think they would remember where stuff was. I listed things like cooking supplies (because my mother in law is an amazing cook and knew she'd be baking up a storm) and medicines, band-aids, clothes, diaper storage, extra toilet paper, etc.  I'm sure there were a lot more things I could have listed but I only got a couple calls while we were gone asking me where things were, so I think this worked out pretty well.

The last and final spread of the handbook was about our pet care. We have a dot and cat and we just wanted to make sure they got fed at the same time and put away and out at the same time as normal. 

If you are planning a trip and leaving your kids with a babysitter or family member I highly suggest investing the time to make one of these books!  The grandma's said they brought it with them wherever they went (mostly because of the emergency info) but they looked at the nap schedule and everything whenever they needed to.

God Bless!

Heather Joy