Reading Stack and Summer Lull

This week we are back in the swing of our own life again, finally. Part of the challenge has been not only settling in after a bunch of travel but also just changing our own set-up here at home. A is at yet another new job (he adores change and stimulation) so we have a new schedule to digest and wrap into our life. Its also a new season and the school year approaches which, as they say in You've Got Mail:

"...makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address. "  

So, that right there is justification for self-organization and assessment and the sort of things I spent the morning on today: making up a new daily schedule, printing off my weekly goals, re-writing the kids chore chart (everyone gets a new chore at their birthday and everyone had birthdays). I am hoping to be absurdly organized and get the chore chart laminated and slapped with a matching dry erase marker in the next week. I have printed attendance charts for the coming school year (state law here in California for homeschooling) and have subscribed to a printer ink program so that we won't have any last minute panics about papers that are finished but need to be printed the night before co-op. Its a good time of year.

We are also in the middle of the lull season. We have had our travel and our excitement and now its time for things like grilling in the backyard, taking slow evening walks, watching the weed patches for caterpillars to raise and checking to see if friends can come over to play. Its the rest in the garden when the extremely fuss-free daylilies bloom, the dramatic peonies and foxgloves are over and the zinnias aren't ready yet. The roadsides are all chickory and oatgrass, no blooming trees anymore and not much else in view besides the gentle endless sun and the tiny basking fence lizards blinking at each other.

We are reading several read-alouds since I can't seem to ever get enough sitting around together reading at this time of year and the kids are just as excited as I am about all the options. We are listening to Pollyanna in audio form from the free and delightful Libravox collection and also reading the third Harry Potter book, The Prisoner From Azkaban which occasionally gets too exciting and full of plot tension to for relief we retire to Swallows And Amazons which is the best for firing the love nature and sense of capability in little boys, not mention a love of sailing....also on the stack at the moment is Dandelion Cottage, a vintage favorite about a group of little girls who play house with an abandoned cottage in their northern Michigan village. The boys always wish we could find a nearby house that's empty when we read the next chapters, and they start eyeing up the empty lot nearby.

 We recently finished Girl Of The Limberlost (added to my narrow list of favorites) and More All Of A Kind Family (book 2) all about our favorite, laugh-out-loud Jewish sibling set, total fun and lots of interesting cultural discussion to boot! We plan to read the rest in the series of both books.  Ah! So much good fun, take-you-away storytelling and interesting stuff to talk about together. We love our read-alouds. The new schedule at our house means we start breakfast early so I am stretching it out a little so that we can linger at the table together making up for the early start with a little reading at the table while we sip our tea and coffee and digest a little. Kind of lovely to find you have the time for some new little nugget of enjoyment. Shift and tweak, it isn't all difficult and grinding.

My Morning Routine

Its a new year and that means that I am working on shaping up my goals, focus and productivity every day! One of the most talked about ways of putting yourself on the right track towards accomplishment and progressiveness is the secret of routine....especially, your morning routine. I'm all over that. I'm a big believer in starting the day on the right foot and aiming at a steady rhythm in life. My husband A and I are really different people in some ways, one of the ways we differ is in our relationship to routine. I didn't grow up in a very regimented family culture and have a lot more connection to following my own inner yens and also to passionate spontaneity. Your spouse can be one of you best teachers in life if you let them into your inner world. I have taught A about the power of spontaneous moments and open spots in your life, he has taught me the warmth and steadying power of routine. I will never be a person who schedules my whole life or slavishly follows the routines I do use but I have learned to really, really love having a Morning Routine to lean on in my life.

This is how I stay steady, how I get the day kicked off and how I maximize my productivity.

My Morning Routine

• 6-6:30am Get up early before the family: For me, this part is key. I like the quiet, early part of the day because I have to it to myself, I am more productive if I have a headstart on the crazy, noisy, insanity. Also, its so peaceful to be up in the calm hours. I feel happier when I get up early.
• 6:30-7:00amPersonal time (Set my MIT for the day [my 3 Most Important Tasks for the day], read, do art, sip tea, write....etc.)
• 7:00am Boys Up: A few of them need to be shaken awake usually.
• 7:15am Breakfast Prep: I have a breakfast schedule and I check the list and put out what I need to get out and pull together. I have optimized for a fifteen minute cook/prep time. Simple, fast, nutritious....that's the goal. Dee sets the table.
• 7:30am Breakfast Together: We try to maximize our time together as a family and even though A works more than 40 hours and that makes it harder, one of the ways we've pushed our edge is by prioritizing eating together as a family at breakfast, not just dinner. 
• 8:30am A, Leaves For Work: A walks to the train a few blocks away which means he is able to leave our single vehicle family with wheels and the boys and I can focus on staying in our groove while he takes off.
• 9:00am-10:00am Chore Hour: We continue to wrestle with how we're executing chore time but at the moment each boy has a set of chores that are his duties and I have one big household job I'm working on every day (Monday is bathrooms) and during this time we all work on getting things squared away. The early finishers have free time until school starts!
• 10:00-12:00 School Time: I am working on one subject a day with the boys and during this time I work on projects with them, do read-alouds, research things we wonder about and also help out A with the math that he is teaching by working with one of the boys a day to take some of the load off of him.
• 12:30 Lunch: Morning is over! Time to eat. Lunch is leftovers. No cooking! Nib sets the table.

How do you plan your morning to set you up for success? This schedule is only what I'm doing right now...things change and I print up a new schedule at least quarterly to put on our fridge. What do you do to 

Shoes and Autumn Mornings

I got up this morning...actually when my alarm went off...and spent a half an hour alone in the living room, curled up under a blanket, reading my next bookclub assignment. It was so chilly, and I was grouchy/groggy when I first got up which was nothing that a private mug of chai tea couldn't cure. When off-track like I have been the past few days, (missed schedules, dropped self-care, over-tired....etc.)  the best thing ever is just to get back on track....and minimize the emotional self-flagellation and instead tell yourself that falling off the wagon is useful because it teaches you how sweet it really is to ride. Meaning is contexual.

 

This is the best time of year ever in some ways. I love the freshness of the Autumn. The way a day carries all the seasons in rotation inside itself. Wake up to the frosty chill of winter thinking of slippers and baked sweet potatoes but also spend a moment in the middle of the day weeding in the garden with a hot vernal sun baking down on your back. Have your cake and eat it too. Welcome to Fall.

 Ru has been growing a lot over the summer and Baby Pom is finally doing a little growing of his own (record breaking midget that he is!) and today I am off to Target looking for new footwear for them both. Pom will just get a new pair of leather crib shoes, no real soles yet but Ru needs yet another pair of long-suffering casual shoes. His current pair lolls open at the toes when he trips up the sidewalk like some kind of bizarre puppet. Must keep the children in shoes. These sorts of things look bad. Neighbors begin to ask questions.

School Year Leap

I am typing furiously tonight. All is in flux. Its time for a new season! I have decided to scrap all the ideas I had for how everything normally goes and start over from ground zero in every way. Home schooling starts in earnest this year...we have a genuine first grader in the house. In order to maintain some level of sanity, make sure the laundry gets done and assure ourselves that said first grader learns to read his Dick and Jane we need new rules.

Henceforth, starting not this week but the next....if you try to call me in the morning you will go straight to voicemail. If you knock on the door and are not bleeding from an orifice I won't answer and if you are waiting for an email from me, rest assured it won't arrive before noon. I am blocking off all morning hours for housework, reading together and school lessons, such as they are. All our social engagements, museum ventures, errands and other jaunts will be shifted to afternoons. Life will become ironclad and organized.

 

Tell me its smart.

And clever.

And so soothingly arranged.

Will you? 

 

I'm pretty sure its the right thing to do and yet...its a big leap.

This involves letting go of my current art fellowship group and every single other thing we've been involved in.....besides our homeschool co-op. And no...we're not going to become one of THOSE families...I think social involvement for Mommy and kids is extremely key. It just means we're starting completely over. Everything I had in place is gone so we're on the hunt for all new, afternoon events. I'm feeling alternately optimistic and lost.

Catching Up...*pant pant*

I bought curtains. Today was the day. We'd been freezing in Vermont all week and I'd been gulping mugs of tea and snapping a lot of pictures of crisp autumnal scenes and suddenly we were home and it was imperative that we have curtains on our windows. I am also itching to get out the flannel sheets, put away the shorts and light a lot of decorative candles.

Am still searching out the ingredients for yet another apple cake and plan to try a good hack at that this week sometime. Am also hoping to bring in from the garage a huge area rug that I found on a curb (truly, it was in fabulous shape!) and tuck its cozy self into the library on the third floor. As I type I am remembering just how heavy said rug is and adjusting my mental plan. Maybe A will have to help me. It is a long way up the third floor.

Tonight I roasted a duck for dinner. A lovely, free-range, organic duck that we bought from a farmer in Vermont. I didn't cook it quite long enough. All the same it was good...(I love duck)...and the gravy I made was exceptional. I recommend making a stock from the giblets to add to your gravy.

Ahem. But, yes...now I'm back to the land of mad laundry, manic carpooling and never ending landscape planning.

And I will get those boxes unpacked if it kills me. It might.