One Year — Week 3

This is a really brief post to say that I got a little behind with week 3 due to being sick. Yes, again. I did do some planning and preparation for reorganizing my kitchen in week 4 (aka now). The cool thing is that Phil had already tackled a lot with this area, so now it’s just further elimination and attempts at organizing what’s there, which won’t be too painful. I have post-it notes on all of the cabinets identifying what I want to get rid of and Phil has agreed, in principle to “go for it.” Now I just need to weed things out and make it work better for us. One area at a time for the rest of the week is my plan.

The calendar thing I already have down. I have a three pronged calendar system. Everything for all of us goes on a wall calendar. This has things like the doctors’ appointments, vet appointments, birthdays, major work schedule information, and so forth. I also keep all of that information plus any school information that the family doesn’t need in iCal on my laptop, which syncs with my Touch. So, all of that information is readily available to me.

For our wall calendar we use FlyLady’s Wall Calendar. The boxes are huge and give us plenty of space to record information for all of us. I love it and buy one every year since she started producing them. I can’t say enough good things about this calendar.

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.