Boot Camp Update: Managers of Their Homes Review

It's time for an update on The Homeschool Mom's Boot Camp.  You may remember I am combining the boot camp with a 21-Days to Discipline challenge in order to revamp our daily schedule and our chore system.

 I would say I am doing "ok" with the challenge, even though it took me a little longer than three days to accomplish my first three steps:

1)  re-read my copy of Managers of Their Homes by Teri Maxwell
2) complete Mom's activity worksheet
3) assist Briana and Destry in completing their activity worksheets.

I re-read my copy of Managers of Their Homes (MOTH) and loved it all over again.  This is my third time through it and I get something new from it each time (likely because of the different seasons during which I've read it).  She already had me sold with her analogy of using a schedule to budget our time just like we "tell our money what to do" with a budget.  We only have so much time (as we only have so much money) and we have to be the ones to control it or it will just. . .disappear with nothing to show for it.

While we have retained the basics of a school schedule for the older children, this time through the most helpful section for me was chapter three, scheduling younger children's days.  She reminded me that "little ones are more peaceful, content, and obedient when their days are planned and routine, including regular changes of activity" (11).  She suggests planned activity changes so that children play in a specific room with specific items for 30 minutes and then you have them change their location and/or activity.  She even encourages rotations of toys for different days of the week and includes art/craft supplies as a suggested 30-minute activity.

I know this, I have done it before, but I have gotten away from it.  I know this is one of the tweaks I need to make to our days so they will go more smoothly.  I've been allowing Kiana and Tyrell too much "free play" and they get into things (read:  sprayed water all over the floor in the kitchen basement using the fun sprayer attached to the faucet), they start bickering or whining and tattling (ergh, one of my major pet peeves), or they just follow me around and hang on me asking if they can watch a movie (only marginally less frustrating than the above two choices).

So this is one of the ways I got slightly distracted from (or we can say I purposefully modified) my original plan.  I went to the store and got a set of four drawers and made a list of 30 different activities that the younger children can do during 30-minute time segments while I am working with older children.  My list includes everything from specific toys like cars, trains, or a doctor kit with stuffed animals to learning activities like playdough, puzzles, books on tape, or computer programs.  I hope to change the contents of the drawers each day and then they can just remove the drawer from its tower and take the fun new activity to a designated place to play until the timer goes off.  At this point of my "boot camp", I allowed this slight modification to take precedence over the individual worksheets step of compiling a daily schedule so I can implement the more structured play starting Monday.

Another distraction was my printing of a 2013 calendar to record some dates we already have commitments for (how ridiculous is that?!) because I am paranoid I am going to forget them.  I am justifying this distraction as I think it falls under 'scheduling', wouldn't you agree?

Another section of the book that stood out to me this time was the concept of "Scheduling for Priorities" discussed in chapter eight.  "We can always be driven by the urgent, or we can take control of our days" (57) and Maxwell firmly believes in scheduling the activities that we truly want to do and know is best (such as reading to our children, memorizing Scripture, or individual time with each child) so they don't continually get brushed aside by "the urgent".  She encouraged me to set aside a "portion of the day properly devoted to some of my highest priorities rather than being driven by the urgent" as "you are laying the foundations in your family in these areas of relationships.  By your example of scheduling your day, being careful to keep relationship priorities in focus, you are modeling this discipline for your children" (57).  I'm looking forward to seeing how my new schedule can better help me nurture relationships within my family.

This brings us to the second item on my assignment list:  Activity Worksheet for Mom, which is "a written list of all God has called you to do each day and the amount of time required to do it" (77). 

Silly me, I allotted only one day for this task but Maxwell says to spend several days considering this worksheet, praying over it, and adding and omitting items, so I'm still working on it.  She says it's normal for the first draft to add up to more than 24 hours worth of activities, which is a relief.  I'm in the "pray and seek your husband's input" stage of the worksheet and Briana and Destry are working on (but not finished) with theirs.

So, there's my update!  Onward and upward I go.  This week I hope to complete an activity worksheet for myself and each of the children--six sheets.