We do laundry daily so there is no separate Focus Day for this. If you live in the city and/or have less clothes to wash this may not be as necessary. It taxes a septic system to do too many loads at once however.  It sorta taxes mom too. ; )  I start the first load before breakfast. Change it after breakfast. Then again during our morning break and again at lunch if need be.  The goal is to have all the clothes folded and put away by midafternoon. No stacks when dad walks in the door.  That is the goal anyway!

I realized my recent habit of sleeping in an extra half hr  or more was throwing it all off for the entire day. I have a chronic pain problem that is exacerbated by immobility. This has been known to wake me in the middle of the night and then I am up for an hr til its better again. I was making up that time by sleeping later. Not a good idea. It is better to get up like my early bird friends and then rest later, when the house is well under control. Today is already a better day. Two loads done so far!

Download impressionist_laundry.doc

Download laundrychart.doc  this one was made by Mrs. Wilt of The Sparrow’s Nest blog and modified with our fonts. It is meant to hang over the machines so the washers know how to set the temps and so on correctly.

I realize some women may be offended by this whole concept but I was so profoundly affected by the story I am linking here regardless. I have fallen into the trap of ‘helping’ in all sorts of ways that in the end did not help at all.

   I want to preface this post with a couple disclaimers. Lest you get the mistaken idea that I am channeling Martha Stewart you should know my history.  As my ten facts revealed I am an only child.  An only child of a single mom to boot. I did not grow up in a traditional family and had no daily father figure. Mom worked odd hours at times and I took over a lot of cooking and housekeeping by necessity, not because of my great training or skill in those areas. As a result things happened whenever they could and we were often a day late and dollar short. This is how I started my homemaking venture.

   Shortly after we married I got pregnant. I was immersed in attachment parenting lit, which though lovely and encouraging did have one drawback – it stressed the need to let go of household standards in favor of rocking babies. This is probably excellent advice for Type A women. If you, like me, find yourself waaaaaay down the alphabet someplace it can spell disaster.  It DID spell near disaster for us. My husband was used to an orderly house and was totally unprepared for my haphazard approach. Couple this with exceptionally poor health on my part and you have the makings for chaos.

   I worked diligently for the better part of that first decade of wife and motherhood to get healthy. I also began reading lots of lit geared towards women seeking to be keepers of their homes and a blessing to their husbands. It became clear to me that though I was physically at home my inability to manage it in a way that blessed my husband was in itself an act of defiance. I knew better after all.  I had read the articles. : / 

   We have spent the last few years in attitude rehabilitation. Actually *I* have. It has been driven home to me in recent weeks that not all my children have been brought fully up to speed in my motives and why it is important to take care of the things Dad has worked so hard to provide for us. So we tweak. We talk. We rededicate ourselves to the challenge. We occasionally call friends in desperation and tears to be reminded that this can happen….

   Like I said, my housekeeping schedule is based upon the Large Family Logistics model. She has a flylady type mailing but unless you are looking at your screen all day (which needless to say will sabotage your housekeeping!) the prompts don’t necessarily come as you need them. I modified those prompts and lists to fit our home and printed them out so I could refer to them throughout the day.  MUCH better!

   The first thing she, FLylady, and other organizers recommend is to have your general day plan set. Include your morning routine such as exercise, lunch and dinner prep, laundry started, whatever you start your day with. Then hit your evening routine since so much depends upon having a good start. This would include checking your calendar, prepping coffee and breakfast, having a clean sink, and general house pickup. Next figure out what chores will happen on which days.( Few of us can clean a house in a day. If you can but then you miss it that scheduled day life is BAD. ; )) For us these chores happen in the afternoons. If you homeschool you will need to figure in when that will happen. We start with Table Time – the seatwork subjects that usually require time with me. That gets scheduled after breakfast. Times are general guidelines. As the LFL says if stuff happens – as it will – then you just ‘do the next thing’. Best advice I have ever heard on the subject.

   I will start the downloads with our Download daily_school_and_chore_routine_binder_page.doc . We have two – one has the general schedule for our "big picture" and another is a checklist so each child/adult can track their personal participation daily. It is laminated and a dry erase marker is nearby so I know if we are indeed staying on track.

   Next we have our Download focus_room_days.doc . You can move these around to suit your schedule. I had to! The LFL lady had a different errand day and it threw off our week. I had to plan mine around the only time we could get piano lessons. You may choose entirely different formats for your forms. I am uploading these in case you wish to use the same fonts and clip art. Then you need only cut and paste your own tweaks. Again these are for personal blessing only. It took HOURS to set up and find the clips so I am hoping to save some of you that precious time. Gosh you hate to even have to say it, but there are women who are selling forms like these on the net or Ebay. Please don’t. 

   Focus room lists to follow. Stay tuned. <g>

    I have been working on my Home Management Journal for some months now. Actually I have been working on several of them – for myself and dear friends. This is hardly an original idea. A few moments on the web will net a number of hits to these binders. I thought it might be helpful to articulate what I loved and what I really didn’t love about the whole concept. Why would a woman who professes disdain for running a home like a factory even entertain the idea much less spend months creating one? Well here goes….

   It all started last summer when I saw a similar binder online. I was intrigued, as I usually am, by super-organized women and their methods. The reason I was intrigued was not to turn my home into a bells-on-the-hour, finely tuned machine however.  Initially the motivation was a bit morbid. It occurred to me that if something tragic happened to me there was really noone on the planet who could easily jump in and take my place. Granted there is probably no ‘easy’ way to do that in a large family, but still, I realized I was storing a LOT of information in my head.  If I went, it was all going with me.  Twenty years of trial and error, of tweaking techniques, of who needed vitamins, of what size the kids were, of how-to-run-this-place. 

    It also occurred to me that while dying is not a common thing for me <g> it DOES happen that my husband or children need to step in and help for varying amounts of time when I am down for the count due to pregnancy complications, postpartum, a child’s surgery, or some unforeseen excitement around here. Even when I am right here there was always some question about when a job was really finished or how to do a task properly or what was expected from school each day. Having all that written out would seem to eliminate a lot of stress on everyone’s part. No more surprises or misunderstandings about expectations.

   I bounced the ideas off of Jen and Elizabeth and we all realized these were very real issues in our homes. While you might be able to wing it with a couple children and a fairly static schedule you can forget smooth sailing if you have a full house and a deployed dad or a pregnant mom or a child with health issues – or how about several of those things! We needed to spell out how things were done and when they should be done. We also realized that we had children who might not have just absorbed by osmosis all the homemaking knowledge that had taken us the better part of two decades to accumulate. It wasn’t that they weren’t awesome kids. But, they did not have the benefit of the years of experience we did. It would be so nice to have a place to share with them what actually worked and what we valued. It would be nice to be able to pass it on.

   So the project began. I had a few priorities for the journal. First it had to be practical. Volumes of papers weren’t likely to be waded through. Only the most useful everyday info was going in here. Second, it had to be pretty.  REALLY pretty. It’s all visual for me. True confession – I just can’t stand the business like forms for housekeeping and menus etc readily available online. They looked sterile and generic to me. If I used those there was a very real possibility that this binder would end up like many of my day-planners – a necessary evil I looked at as rarely as possible. To prevent that from happening I decided to make scrapbook style dividers and covers and to search the net for the nicest clip art to illustrate the pages. While the binder was my nod to the need for order and structure, the look of it was my statement about resisting the institutionalizing of education and the home.

   Since I was making one for myself I figured I would make multiples and share with my friends. Each of us got a theme.  Mine is Vintage. Jen’s was more Country Floral (see pics left).  Elizabeth chose Susan Branch since her daughter Mary Beth loved her graphics.(I will link to Elizabeth’s as soon as she has the pics uploaded) The same fonts (different for each of us) are used throughout on all the forms to lend visual continuity.  The end result was some binders we could all live with and use daily with a smile. I have been using mine for some time now and feel comfortable sharing the repro’s if they are of help to other women. I am going to begin uploading today but will likely need to break up the posts over the next several days due to time constraints. I hope to put the downloads on the sidebar as soon as possible also so they are easy to access.

   Meantime – you can download (for personal use only please) the Download vintage_binder_dividers.doc in Word documents. You can also download the divider labels in ovals if you prefer Download mcd_dividers.doc . The label sizes are ready to go for index labels. I glued a bit of glue stick to the backs to make them stick in the clear label holders. The filler pages, which will be posted shortly, are all in Word Fonts so they should be viewable and printable on any pc. Though mine are in Victorian fonts you may want something different. You can highlight the document and change to a different font easily. The clipart is from all over. It cannot be used for resale.

    I will send the first section’s filler pages and lists – Housekeeping – in the next post.  Enjoy!

Care to spend about 40% less on your Christmas gifts? Pick up a Sunday paper this week! Your local Michael’s, Hobby Lobby, and Joann’s Fabrics generally run catalog flyers in the the Sunday paper with a weekly 40% off coupon.  The catch is you can only redeem the coupons for non-sale items and only one item per visit. This is fine news for gift shopping however since most of the items I would normally buy are often not the loss leaders in the flyers.

If you haven’t actually walked all the way around one of these stores let me suggest a couple aisles that caught our eyes last week. First of all, the doll section. Michael’s had an American Girl look-alike doll for $15.  I kid you not. With the coupon that comes to about $9. Less than a tenth of the original AG dolls, which though lovely DO in fact get ratty hair and lost limbs. I can testify to that. : /  There was a wall of clothing and accessories to go with the dolls, none of which remotely resembled a Bratz doll wardrobe. If you want authenticity you can purchase the lookalike doll at Michaels and get a vintage dress from AG.

Further on in the toy aisle there were classic wooden toys like lacing beads and alphabet blocks. There were also a number of kits – science kits, construction kits, pencil by number, beading, mini looms, pottery kits, hand sewing projects, and more.

In the actual stitchery section there was also a find – Jean-e-ology iron on embellishments for skirts, tops and of course jeans. You can take a simple homemade skirt, purse, etc and give it chain store appeal for about $3.  Or $1.80 with your coupon <g>  My girls were ALL over these fwiw.

Hobby Lobby has a similar offering and Joanns has a bit less. I plan to make a weekly visit to at least two of these stores while the kids are at piano lessons in coming weeks.  Assuming I can keep shopping – sigh! The spirit is willing but the flesh is…. contracting. : p