One Year — Week 2

This was another brain week. Part of it was about developing and refining routines. I already have routines that I developed after my near-death experience to help me stay on track during the day. Those early days were scary for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I would forget things very easily and, at least, once fed Sam twice and Peyton not at all. Poor thing.

But, now that I”m doing better, I needed to refine and redesign those routines, so I concentrated on that. Everybody (except Phil) has routines around here. Even Katie. We do the same things in the same order every time, and that makes it a routine. Ben works from the get up, eat breakfast, get dressed routine. He does activity sheets after he gets dressed and then he plays. Lots of play. And, to him, the activity sheets are all fun, so it works out just fine.

My routine in the morning is a bit more hectic, but it works. And everyone gets fed, dressed, pottied, etc. We are getting disrupted a bit right now as Ben is starting to work on potty training, but it still works in principle.

I borrowed the basic rhythm of my routines from FlyLady, but the content is strictly me and my online/personal stuff. Every routine has a mix of work and home activities in it, and it seems to work for me.

Sample:

Early Afternoon Routine

Change Katie’s diaper
Feed Katie
Fix Ben’s lunch
Eat lunch
Pick toys for Quiet Time
Set TV to music channel
Take a rest period
Work on One Year
Grade

The other thing I did this week was try to figure out where I want to go with my career and set some goals to achieve that. This was a bit more of a struggle for me because I have so many different things pulling at me and I don’t know, for sure, what I want to do with the rest of my life. There I things that I truly love about teaching: interacting with students, helping them see what they can already do (but don’t realize that they can do), and helping them develop new skills. But there are also things that I hate: grading, the sense of entitlement that some students seem to have — this is not a new problem, I remember when I was a GTA having at least one student a term tell me that s/he paid my salary so I worked for them. I was in a unique position of being paid from a grant, so that wasn’t actually true. Anyway, there’s a lot there that I need to think about and figure out how to make a workable life with — one that honors who I want to be while at the same time uses the talents that I have.

It’s interesting to be thinking this way instead of thinking about the fact that I spent ten years putting that degree at the end of my name so I have to use it. Kind of liberating, but also kind of weird.