God in the little things?

It is so exciting that when you let Him, God will work in you and take you on a journey unlike any you could ever imagine - and one of the best things that I am discovering is that He even cares about the little things! God wants to be involved in EVERY aspect of our lives - so often we feel like we are doing nothing important keeping house, raising children and trying to be the wife and mother God wants us to be.  We think that God only cares about the "churchy" stuff, our prayer life, how many meetings we go, what we are doing to affect the community but the truth is God is interested in ALL of our lives, the words we speak, the jobs we do, the way we raise our children, the meals we cook. it seems unbelievable but it is true because it is all the little things that we do that add up to make us who we are!

This last year God has been teaching me, through books, through people I've met or spoken too and through blogs etc a lot about keeping house! Yes, He cares enough to teach us what we need to know - I'm not a natural housekeeper - some things have come as a surprise to me (such as having to clean cupboards out) as for the beginning of our marriage we had reason to move every year so things never got so "bad" to make me realise why exactly people did spring cleaning! Don't ask me how I thought these things stayed clean as I just didn't think about it lol.

Also with baby number 5, I am beginning to realise that it takes work and planning to have a household that runs smoothly and has a sense of order!

Here are some of the resources that have helped me with this recently

First we have the "Maxwells" I have both "Managers of their homes" and "Managers of their Chores" books and both have really helped me, the first taught me how and why scheduling is good and healthy (though we do only use schedules in a loose way) and the second has helped me realise what chores need doing in the house and how to get the children involved and how important it is to involve the children (this is still very much a work in progress)

I have also found the "Boyers" immensely helpful reading their books "Parenting from the heart" by Marilyn and "yes they're all ours" by Rick, also "Fun Projects for Hands on Character builidng" has given me lots of good ideas for doing things with the children. 

There are more resources too, we have enjoyed watching "The Duggars" and reading "20 and counting" to see how God has been working out His purposes in their busy lives and there have been many blogs that have encouraged me and given me ideas, not to mention friends that have shared with me and prayed for me. 

I still have so much to learn regarding the whole housekeeping, parenting, being a good wife journey but I am constantly learning and the best bit is that our God shows us the way and brings us into contact with the right people - He cares for ALL of our lives! 

I will share with you how God gave me the idea to "transform" our hallway recently too soon!    

The Joys of Scheduling

I just had to blog about our day today
Day 1 of implementing our new schedule, which I finally put together over the weekend - after months of reading managers of the home and starting but never finishing it I decided to just sit until it was done (thankfully we were at my parents for the weekend so had some help with the children)

It has been a HUGE success

Ok then so we didn't follow it perfectly, children wouldn't always co operate and some got missed out - but on the whole I am very impressed and pleased with how today went.

There was a purpose all day - to be honest in previous days I would plan some school and then when things went off track I would just write the whole day off - leaving the children to their own devices (which meant sometimes playing nicely other times fighting and making messes) in the name of "unschooling" heehee.
But today - we had a plan to look too - throughout the day I would check our schedule to see what we were all supposed to be doing (only the baby didn't have a schedule) and it made the day go more smoothly,  the children stayed out of trouble (most of the day) and I felt like we acheived something!
Some chores got done and some schooling - admittedly my eldest daughter refused to get dressed until after dinner and she also refused to do her schoolwork - but rather than stress at her I am deciding on a consequence for her to live with! And I am hoping as they realise this whole scheduling thing isn't going to go away, eventually she'll actually enjoy it - knowing what's happening and when - and knowing that we have time to fit things in that used to just be forgotten or we used to run out of time for - like building a gingerbread house!

more to come on the story of our gingerbread house - with more pics but that's a whole other blog post!!!

My Scheduling journey

I invested in "Managers of the Home" by Teri Maxwell a couple of months ago and have read it thinking it's great but it's taking me a while to actually implement it, so I thought that if I blogged about it I may find more motivation!!!

Today I was filling in the activity worksheets for Mum, then I started on the children's and hit my first problem - I wanted to schedule the children some chores but to be honest although I believe in children having chores I've never been much good at implementing it, in fact to be totally honest I'm pretty clueless - I find it hard enough figuring out what chores I need to do let alone assigning them to the children! And recently I have been feeling really down, like I'm going round in circles, I'm busy doing one job, sorting something out in the house while the children are off making more messes for me to clear up! They have also (and I hate to admit to this) been showing a real lack of care for their stuff recently (or mine) and things are getting broken. I know part of the problem is I need to have a really good declutter but with a needy baby and trying toddlers it can be difficult to find time (one of the things I'm hoping will change with the scheduling)

So, I turned to the chapter on managing your chores and I made myself a master chore list - I didn't use their diligence worksheets for this one but just made a list then created a table on ms word, I listed all the chores (for now as I've decided to take it slowly) and how often they needed to be done and who I was going to assign.

I'm not planning on implementing it fully straight away as I think to get it to work it is going to have to be small changes a bit at a time! But today I asked my eldest (8 yo dd) to get the washing in for me as this will be her job and she did a smashing job!! And I told my son (6yo) that his job will be the vacuming and off he went to get the vacum and get started!!

So we're off to a good start but lets see how it goes - I've also assigned a meal preparation helper for each meal - my 6yo son for breakfast, my 4yo daugher for lunch and my 8yo daughter for tea I'm hoping to implement that from tomorrow, and tomorrow my plan is to make a weekly menu to aid me in shopping and knowing what to cook each day!

If you're interested in looking at the book - you can see it (and purchase it) here

And if you already have the book/plan to purchase it and want to share your journey with me then let me know and maybe we can set up a link to each others blogs to glean ideas and encouragement on our journey to make our homes the best places we can!