I use many things in my daily life to help me. I also have plans to use others. So today I am going to be talking about that.
Yesterday I talked about Flylady. This I believe will turn into another page on this blog. There is a lot to it but it is fully customizable to your needs.
One of the other big helpers to us that we discovered this year is Once A Month Meals. Now full confession time here. We are more like Once every 2 month meals. That is just how we eat. However it is a HUGE help to us everyday to have this. We are currently doing the Instant Pot meal plan. Everything in it is stuff that you cook in the instant pot. Heaven. It really is! However at any given time we can choose from any of the meal menus and we can mix and match to suit our needs. When we do our cooking day it is expensive, however we save money over the coarse of the time that we are using it… so that is good! It also is a good nearly solid day of prep on cooking day. But then we have a freezer full of food and the freedom that gives you is amazing! I hope to do a time lapse of that soon if I could figure out the camera angle in our small kitchen. 😉
I now don’t have to worry about dinner when Tony is away on business or gets stuck in traffic or just comes home later then normal. Also I don’t have to worry about not having something out for dinner if I am out all day.
Other things that have helped me pertain to homeschooling. I just updated our homeschooling tab above, but Homeschool Tracker has been great for me. Fostering is at times a part time job (other times it is a full time job). Having everything laid out for Max so he can do what he can and then I can teach him what other things he needs to learn has been VERY helpful. I am able to print out daily tasks list for the week on the weekends, put together worksheet packets and then have him do 1 a day. Then when he is done I can grade and reassess if we need to go over something more later, or if I can just clarify something that night. Works GREAT!
I can’t really use Homeschool tracker yet for Nathaniel. He is starting school but he is very much mommy centric at this point so I have to do that when I have time. Typically 2-4 days a week. However he is only 4 so that is okay. Most of his schooling is only geared for 30 weeks anyway!
One area that we have been having issues in (and this is nothing new) is in the area of child responsibility. Flylady is great, but it works best if there is responsibility with all members of the house. Sadly the kids don’t do this as well as I would like. So in the next month I am hoping to start Accountable Kids with the children.
I used this program starting about 2 months before I had Nathaniel. It worked great for Max then. However Nathaniel didn’t have an easy time once he was born (if you remember right) and a month later, all that work was gone. I feel that it is time to start again and any future placements we get (provided they are not an infant) can also learn the program once the boys are doing it well. I am really looking forward to this and hope that it will be the tweak our family needs!
I find that that is what life is. Tweak here, tweak there. Drop this that isn’t working and try something else. I am confident that I will never have a perfect life, but thankfully I have the internet to research the perfect tweak!