Balancing My time

With the arrival of the warmer weather, I find it even harder to balance the busyness of my life -- actually, the reality is, I find it hard to accomplish everything I would like to do even on a dull day in the dead of winter. The real problem is I have too many interests, way too many distractions and lots of obligations. These then cause a tug of war between what I know I should do and what I want to do. It also interferes with my goal of living simply. (Perhaps I will explain that more deeply in another post sometime later).

I picked up a book at a homeschool conference that we attended last year in April, called Managers of Their Homes. It was an eye opener. A lot of what it teaches, I already knew, but the idea of scheduling your time into 1/2 hour to one hour increments was an interesting concept to me.

I was able to implement it for a while into almost the entirety of our day, but then our schedule changed again, our basement got ripped apart for remodelling, and I didn't keep up. We still mostly stick to it during our classroom hours, but lately even the children are becoming more and more distracted. Most likely a result of their mother being distracted, I'm afraid.

I am looking forward to completeing our basement reno, as I find much of my distraction comes from living in a perpetual mess that the displaced books, book shelves and other paraphanelia causes. Not dirt -- just unorganization and chaos. I love to organize, so this constant chaos tends to confuse the very orderly driven side of my brain and I get distracted. I want to tidy up, to put in order the things around the room that distract me, but for the time being that is not possible, so I distract myself with the computer and other piddly things, which in turn makes me somewhat immune to the cries of my children.

I console myself with the thought that the school year will be done soon, and hopefully my basement will be completed before the new school year begins.

I will spend the summer reading up on ideas to improve my children's learning and my teaching skills as well as setting up as much of a schedule as possible again. This busyness is really only a short season in my life, so until my children have left the nest, I will continue to somehow, someday remember to give thanks for the busyness in my life. Being able to balance my time will come soon enough.

The little girls have some much coveted movie time while Grampa is framing in the ductwork.

The Engineer and Grampa doing some more framing.