Summer Re-Do

We are still trying to find our summer groove around here. My work schedule completely shifts in the summer so that sometimes I’m teaching as few as 5 students in a week, and sometimes I have as many as 40. It all adds up to me being home full time Monday, Friday and the weekend, and then working a floating schedule on the other days. I’ve been trying to figure out a workable routine for the 4 days I’m home all day and on the days where I only teach for a few hours, but we’re having a hard time getting settled in.

A few things going right:

Daily Quiet Time- 30 minutes of everyone in their own space in the middle of the afternoon is giving me the bit of quiet I need to recharge and be a better mama for the rest of the day.

Getting our chores done first thing in the morning. A load of laundry, checking the plants, any cleaning that needs to be done . . .

Heading outside early before the heat gets to be too much.


Things I want to incorporate:
 Daily project time. We had this going during the school year when we had much less time. We now have double the time available to us so we should have even more project time, right?

Somehow that whole “we have the entire day ahead of us” thing makes me think the day actually expanded to be 30 hours instead of the actual 24 and I end up getting to the end of the day and wondering where the day went.

A plan. I have to face the music here- I can’t completely wing it every day. “Winging it” for a week just means that I end up with 7 loads of laundry, a dirty kitchen and we can’t find a pencil anywhere. It also means we don’t paint or create or do the stuff we really like to do because I haven’t thought things through far enough to make sure we can actually carry through with our plans.

I’ve always blamed my forgetfulness and lack of foresight on being a creative type, but maybe that’s just me. The truth is that if I don’t take a bit of time to plan ahead (even if it’s just for the next few hours) we all wind up frustrated because we can never really accomplish anything.

Mostly it just means that I need to be better about having pegs in our day in order for us to be sure we make space for the things we want to do. And it also means that we need to have a little morning meeting to see what the boys would like to accomplish that day so that we are still doing things they are interested in.

Maybe by next week we’ll look a little better in this routine thing.

And one more thing, perhaps slightly off-topic, but in the same vein in my mind: I’ve been looking at different learning spaces and house decorating inspiration and feeling grumpy about our lack of space here: my tiny little townhouse in the city . . . but I’m determined to resolve some of those issues this month. Our space can’t change, but my attitude (and our organization and furniture arrangement) can! So this month I’m working on our main living space- the room that has to function as our living room, dining room and learning space. Right now it is heavily leaning in the direction of learning space, and not in a good way. So I’m hunting inspiration! Blogs, articles, pictures . . . anything that you think might jive with the theme in our house: simple, clean, easy to maintain.