"Planning"

***In case you need evidence of the scattered and chaotic nature of our house (or maybe just my brain in this case), I wrote this Sunday after the kids were in bed, but just opened my tablet to find it still sitting unpublished...it WAS proofread as of Sunday night. No guarentees now!***


We are "back to school" next week, or I guess tomorrow.  I have found that we have a little less chaos and get at least some "official" school work done if I make a plan for the week.  I have said before that we are fast moving and all over the place.  Because of our odd schedule we are able to have only one vehicle. This is great, but it does mean that we need to plan ahead a bit more if we are going to get all the things done we want to do.  We have the kids schedules, Eric's work and teaching schedules, and 1, 2, or 3 peoples training schedules to work into the family plan for the week.  We spent the better part of last year working Eric's Ironman training plan into our regular schedule.  He raced in July and Charlie had his last triathlon of the year in August, so currently we just have my 70.3 (coming up in a few weeks) and then a marathon I am training for which is in October.  This means that when I plan our week it takes me the better part of Sunday (we're talking from after church to around bedtime), several glasses of wine, and 3 or 4 calendars to sort everything out.  It also means that all the cleaning I did on Friday to pick up from the week totally goes out the window because the children are not being followed and nagged to pick up their shit.  OK, it isn't all them.

This is what the kitchen table looks like when I plan.

Today Eric was working so the kids got to break the food in the living room rule and had a "fun dinner picnic" on the coffee table (fun for them and it makes it seem less like I am just too scattered to get the table clear for dinnertime...)

Much like my record keeping, it took me a while to find a system that worked well for me.  I used strictly google calendars for a long time, but the more school work I needed to organize, the harder this got.  I tried just notebooks, but they weren't structured enough.  I finally got a Filofax (and my Mom made fun of me, something about a romcom where someone leaves their Filofax in a cab? I don't know...).  I searched and searched and searched on Etsy and found a planner bundle with most of the things I wanted and then added the missing thing from free printables I found on Google.  I actually was able to organize our bills and other stuff with the planning bundle too, so that was a bonus.  I will post links for the Etsy store at the bottom of this post.  Over all it is a pretty good bundle.  There is some stuff I didn't use and some pages are doubles, just in a different style, but I got it on sale and the pages are editable, so I thought it was worth it.  

So, in this pic you get an idea of the nonsenses that is my planning routine.  I have here a monthly lesson planning calendar, a weekly detailed lesson planning calendar, a monthly activity/field trip calendar, and then the family schedule calendar...and then once it is all planned on paper, it gets recorded on Google so everyone can see what is going on when and where they need to be at what time and when they will be picked up or dropped off (really just me and Eric...but you can set your phone to buzz when you need to leave and you can't make paper buzz when you need to leave, so there is that).  I also add our dinner menu on because otherwise it will be 6:30 and beans aren't hydrated or the crock pot wasn't filled and turned on and we eat spaghetti again. 

This is the Etsy store where I purchased the planner bundle (I have no idea who this woman is, but she is in the US and has a very quick response time):

Planning Inspired Etsy Shop

This is the Filofax I chose, Domino.  I didn't get it on Amazon, I found it at a local store called The Paper Peddler (http://www.thepaperpeddler.com). I split about 50/50 between Amazon and locally owned shops, mostly depending on if I can wait the 2 day shipping to get my hands on what I am buying.  In this case, I couldn't... 

Filofax on Amazon

This site has a bunch of different planning templates.  I use the pretty pink, green, and orange household schedule.
Random Free Internet Printables

I hope something in here might be useful.  It's a cumbersome planning routine, but we don't seem to have a way around it unless we want more scrambling, more yelling, and a hell of a lot less schooling. We have enough trouble WITH a plan, weeks without a plan just go to shit. Fast.

Well, as you can see, I have a glass of wine to finish (I am not going to drink that cold cup of coffee, I promise). Cheers! And good luck!