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Feb 16

More Odd Looking Calendar Strategies

Joshua remembers the progressive dinner as “a lot of work,” especially for a middle school age young man. But to have him have time to throw a dinner party, he had to have time to learn to cook, and to have time to learn to cook, he needed a mentor who had time to teach, and to have a mentor who had time to teach, the mentor needed time to prepare, and for the mentor to have time to prepare, routine life had to be under control, and for routine life to be under control, attention and time had to be given to planning, and to have time to give attention and time to planning, Executive Oversight meetings had to be a settled issue. Accrued Benefits. Now are you ready to finish the list of thinking strategies before scheduling the deep cleaning tasks onto a perpetual cleaning calendar? You see there is a House-that-Jack-Built connection between all this cleaning detail and the world of family frolic and fun. Read more

Feb 14

Progressive Dinner

What night is your family night? We started our family nights before most people think they have a family. Yes, even when only two of us were the family, we had family nights. We read books together,  books we’d use years later when we did have children sitting around listening. We’d make home improvement plans. We’d play games, usually Scrabble, which my husband would invariably win, even though I would have the most unusual words. If there were a day of the week named Flexible, that’s the night we would have schedule family nights, but our most popular days were either Tuesdays or Thursdays. Read more

Feb 12

An Odd Looking Calendar

When does a yearly calendar not look like a yearly calendar? When it only has twenty-four days in a month.

My perpetual cleaning calendar has only twenty-four planned opportunities each month to handle all the deep cleaning projects on the room cleaning chart lists. This schedule automatically eliminates all Sundays from cleaning (hooray!) and builds in four to seven additional “free” days for catch-up, sick days, book reading marathons, vacations, cooking sprees, puzzle building, or whatever else life brings.

Unlike the typical twelve page calendar, this calendar is only one sheet, a true year at-a-glance, to show which deep cleaning appointment you have scheduled for each day. Now all of that should make the task seem manageable, shouldn’t it? Read more

Feb 9

Dirty Clothes and Hunger Cries

All you diligent teens with only a bedroom to worry about can listen in today and prepare for the future.

Real life means household overseers cannot spend all their time tweaking strategic room cleaning plans no matter how much fun time trials are. Within a few days, someone will need clean socks and within a few hours everyone will need warm food. Read more

Feb 8

Week Three, Part Two: Timed Coordination

Time for more timing! After you have designed a scheme for weekly routine cleaning, you need to test the plan.

Instead of the quick tidy-up five minute flash, scurrying from room to room, you’ll now invest fifteen to twenty minutes a day doing cleaning that you know will attend to all the routine tasks over the course of a week. How will you know how much time you need each day? Or if you have broken the tasks down enough to fit in the time frame? Here’s the plan: Start with ten minutes for each day’s assigned tasks, work really hard to accomplish those tasks inside that deadline, and only inch it up minute by minute when you are absolutely sure you can’t ever do your complete routine run-through without more time. Read more

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