To Do List: Get Organized!

I decided with all that is going on I needed to become more organized with our homeschooling for this upcoming year. I sat down with Darling and Tenderheart and we picked days that we wanted off and then counted up how many to get to 170 days of schoolwork (that is the most lessons we do in any one book) and we should be able to finish all books in mid April. Of course there will be many things that come up and more times that we decide we need a break but that gives us a whole month or so to play with so surely we can get it all done early and enjoy a nice long summer break next year. I feel like a little stress has come off of me just having a plan. I am really a planning and list making type A personality. I really love having a place for everything and everything in its place although you would never know it by the way my house looks. I tend to either keep it perfectly or not at all. So as far as keeping all the toys and clothes put away - I could never get it done unless the kids moved out lol. 

I am also hoping to schedule chores and jobs for the kids to do on a weekly basis to help me out around the house more since I will be gone a lot more than they are used to. I have decided against allowance for these thinking that they need the intrinsic reward more than monetary gain for helping others. It is more of a I feed, clothe, and shelter you so you can help with the dishes and laundry kind of thing. Maybe I am too old fashioned in my belief that it builds character but I don't think so. More kids need to learn the value of hard work- I can't tell you how many places I have been where the employee acts like I am a pain because I force them to DO THEIR JOB to wait on me! This is something I never would have done to anyone and have always prided myself in being a hard worker no matter how menial my job because I was raised that if you don't work you don't eat. By the time I was sixteen I had a job and I paid for almost all of my own clothes and gas and ballgame money. Hopefully I am doing the right thing I really want them to be heavenly minded and to think of others before themselves.

"In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’  Acts 20:35 NIV