Habits: Focus Part 2

Many people have offered me advice on keeping my house and providing a good home for my family. All involved forming good habits. I have been open to these ideas but, as I have written before, have the tendency to jump to the championship game, forming in depth schedules that would result in the perfect home. Many plans only worked short term and some didn’t even make it past the planning stage. So I am going to try to continue to tackle this at a slower pace.

It's been amazing how 6 small goals have already made a difference in my Home and House. Our evenings and mornings were much calmer. Not to mention that someone could have shown up unannounced and I would’ve opened the door without first running around filling diaper boxes with everything that was out of place. Though, for now, I still reserve this system for the bad days. Just like you can’t tell a kid once to chew with their mouth closed and break the bad habit, I don’t expect after one week that good habits are set and bad ones broken. The paper piles may be gone, but likely will return to the list someday. For now I will focus on a few new weekly house goals. As a whole my main focus stayed the same. (You can view this week’s goals on the Focus page) Below is the outline that I will continue to follow, for now.J

Goals for a Better Home:

·         Personal Focus to better my relationship with God.

·         Get rid of distractions at key times of each day.

·         Add something that gives more of me to my family.

Goals for a Better House:

·         Start the day with a house in order, I have been told how well this works for years, why didn’t I listen sooner.

·         Start each evening with the house in order.

·         Work on week-long project(s) to better the house.

I eventually hope to move past the simple habits stage and start to produce more routines to tackle household jobs. I do have a few working schedules already but many things just happen when it gets so bad they can’t wait anymore or we are having company. I think developing these allow more time for my family. I want to be able to do the activity my kids and/or husband suggest without housework lurking in the back of my mind because I am continually behind. 

There are a few things I’d like to point out.  I want to clarify that each day if I check off all my goals I will not sit and watch TV. There is still plenty to be more to be done. My goals are for weekdays, which I forgot to mention before. Weekends are a whole different beast. Many Mondays are spent catching up. Most importantly as I have seen over my 13+ years of parenting these goals will adjust to fit different times in my life, and even different seasons.  As we all know if you have a newborn sometimes starting your day right might mean you were dressed and teeth brushed by 9:00. We are past this stage in our family, but our schedule changes a lot throughout the year. With 5 active kids we don’t always get to eat dinner as a family, so instead we may have a family bedtime snack. We need to be flexible, but always reserve time for the important things.  Everything else is up for negotiation day by day.    

PS How about those #1 ranked Kansas State Wildcats!