Weekly Update: 11

28 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment

by Kandice Mann in Children, Christianity, Infant, Toddler, Weekly Update Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

This week Kennedy was teething, starting solids, and having some separation-from-mommy issues, and we stepped up our game on potty training with Kaylynn. From the beginning of this journey, I declared in my heart (and I think on this blog too), that my girls take priority over any lists. They are too precious and time is too short for me to ignore them when they need me, just so I can get another load of laundry done or even save our family a few extra dollars.

It’s a hard balance though. At this point in my journey, I know that I am sacrificing some of the time I wish I could be spending with them so I can break my 27 years of bad habits. But I have to keep things in perspective when I do choose a task on my list over them. Part of My Housekeeping Mission Statement says” I will make strides everyday… to set an example for my children.”

I don’t want my girls to fall into the same sinful life that I have up to this point. And yes, I say sinful because my disorganization stems from being lazy and being a poor steward of my time. It’s a harsh truth but it comes with the reality that only by God’s grace, mercy, and strength will I be able to overcome this sin and live a better life. If I don’t recognize the sin in it, I will try to fix it myself and fail. By recognizing the sin, I can repent and ask my powerful Saviour for his help.

So, as you might have gathered already, the girls required a little extra of my time this last week which is perfectly fine with me. In terms of “things I got checked off my list,” my week wasn’t very good. However, if you look into the hearts and minds of my 2 precious girls, it was a great week! Please keep that in mind as you read what I did/ didn’t get done.

Still Working On…

Daily chores- Dishes and quiet time are about the only things I got done almost everyday. The other items were pretty sporadic and there were a few that I didn’t get done at all.

Weekly chores- I’m not sure that I personally got anything done on this list. But Matt was a huge help this week. I was able to mark several things off my list everyday because of him. He did all that, worked 2 jobs, and found time to be a wonderful daddy. I am so blessed!

Potty training- I’m really not sure what section to put this in, because it’s not actually listed on my week-by-week plan. But its going great! At the beginning of the week I decided to do cloth only. No diapers or pull-ups at home unless she was sleeping. She would tell me every time as she was going and we would make it to the potty in time to get a little in it.

The first day of this I was home alone and needed to feed Kennedy. I was afraid we would make a bigger mess if I wasn’t able to help get her undies off, so I let her go naked from the waist down. Looking back, I’m not sure how that logic works, but the strategy did! She got all her pee in the potty while I was feeding Kennedy.

Since then we have gone naked from the waist down everyday and only had 1 mess (and boy was it a mess!). After a few days we tried undies again, but she peed in them so we went back to being naked from the waist down. When we leave the house she wears pulls-up and will use the potty if I ask her and time it right. But if not, she goes in her pull-ups. I think we will try loose-fitting clothes like shorts tomorrow to get the feel of having something on, then transition to undies.

New Goals…

Tag for JBF- I didn’t get anything new tagged. That means this week I am going to have to really push it. If I want to be able to buy new-to-us stuff at the sale, I need to be able to sell the stuff I have now. It’s a good thing this week is a catch up week.

Plan weekly menus- I created a simple table to fill out every week that has a place for breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, and dessert for each day of the week. I also created a theme for dinner each day of the week. The days are

  • Surplus Sunday: aka leftovers
  • All-American Monday: this could include meals that scream American like hamburgers and hotdogs, but it will also include regional meals like New Orleans rice and beans, Chicago-style pizza, Philly cheese steak sandwiches, or New England clam chowder.
  • Have it your way Tuesday: each week a different family member will choose what to have for dinner on this day. For a while this will only be Matt and I and then we can guess what the girls would say. After each family member has “had it their way,” we will have a meal that each person puts together themselves. We’ll put out a bunch of ingredients and let each individual put in what they like. Examples include make your own pizza bagel, potato bar, salad bar, maybe even a Sunday bar.
  • Worldwide Wednesday: foods from across the globe, some will be familiar like spaghetti, but others will be new tastes.
  • Crockpot Thursday: easy on the mommy.
  • Breakfast for Dinner Friday: breakfast is such a favorite in our house that we are going to have it for dinner every week! But we’ll change up the menu since there are so many breakfast choices.
  • Soup, Salad, and/ or Sandwich Saturday: I’m not sure this one needs much explanation.

I’m excited to start using this menu! I really hope that we get creative with it and build some fun family traditions.

Start feeding Kennedy solids- check out these pictures

Plan for April- almost done. I’m going to finish this one up tonight I hope.

Looking Ahead…

Week 12 is a catch up week. If all goes as planned I will probably be spending most of the week tagging for JBF. But I also plan on starting a blogging series either tonight or tomorrow on my cloth diaper reviews. So you can look forward to that!

Change in plans: Weeks 7 & 8

03 Mar 2011 1 Comment

by Kandice Mann in Weekly Update Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sorry I didn’t get a post up last week. I was out of town on the day that I normally write my new posts.

During week 7 I was supposed to start adding in a new routine for the girls with unique daily learning  activities. I tried to plan this while I was out of town but I started feeling overwhelmed by how much this would add to my day. I decided that when I got back I was going to evaluate my goals, make some changes, and plan a catch up week. I didn’t realize that week 8 was a scheduled evaluation week anyway. Here are some of the changes I made to my week-by-week plan:

  • I did some reorganizing so that some of the more intense tasks are paired up with easier ones.
  • Instead of having an evaluation week every 4 weeks and a catch up week every 12, both are now every 4 weeks.
  • On tasks that will take longer than a week to complete (but aren’t added permanently to the weekly schedule), I have them listed for each week that I’ll be working on them. Example: to make a good price book, I am going to need to spend more than 1 week on it. So it’s listed for 4 weeks. This helps me to visualize and think about how much I have planned to do for each week.
  • I’ve added 4 more weeks to the schedule. At first I was bummed about this because I really like the even 6 months. But when I remind myself that originally I thought it would take me a year to accomplish all these goals, I’m okay with 7 months.
  • I’ve added 2 new tasks to accomplish: 1.) I want to start blogging more. As I get more done on my lists, I want to be able to give you more details on my goals than just how my week went. So be prepared to see more blog posts throughout the week. 2.) Start using cloth diapers. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while and planned on adding it to my goals for the second half of the year, but I’ve decided to start it earlier. Here is the story on why. This past weekend I went to a friend’s baby shower and she is planning on using cloth diapers. I got jealous. After the shower I was thinking about why I don’t use cloth diapers yet and my reason is that I still haven’t been able to catch up on the laundry. There’s no way I would be able to add cloth diapers to the laundering schedule right now. But… if I could get caught up on the laundry, then it would become a possibility. That evening I was talking to Matt on the phone (he didn’t go with me on this trip) and he told me that he had all the laundry done. Isn’t he wonderful? So now all I have to do is keep up with the laundry for 2 weeks to prove to myself that I can do it, and then we will start using cloth diapers. I’m very excited because there are many benefits. The biggest benefit is that it will save us lots of money. It’s also good for the environment of course and it will help with potty training too (something that we have started earlier than I scheduled).

I think that is all the changes I made but you can check it out yourself to make sure.

 

6 Months to a New Mann

16 Jan 2011 1 Comment

by Kandice Mann in Weekly Update Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ahhh!!! Its been almost a month and a half since my last post. Sorry guys. If all goes as planned, this won’t happen again. I’ve set some goals for the new year and one of them is to write at least one new blog post each week, starting now.

And that leads into the topic of this post… my new year’s goals. If you have been following my blog, you know that I made a list of goals that I wanted to accomplish before Kennedy was born. Kennedy was born, and the goals were not accomplished. I got off track, but now I’m back at it!

The Christmas season is over and life is back to normal, whatever that means. Instead of setting New Year’s Resolutions (which generally come without a plan and thus fail) I made New Year’s Goals. The first week of January was spent writing down my goals and mapping out how I was going to achieve them. When I started, I thought I was going to spend the whole year working on them, but as I mapped it out, I think it can be done in 6 months. Woo-hoo! It won’t be easy by any means, and I hope that I’m not being too ambitious.

Most of these goals are the same ones I had before, but now they are written differently, with more specifics and with the smaller tasks needed to achieve them. Click here (or on the “My Goals” tab up top) to see what I came up with.  You can also click here to see how I’m going to reach my goals.

If you are taking this journey with me (as opposed to reading from the sidelines, which is okay too), then my challenge to you is to…

1. Sit down with pen and paper and write out your goals
2. Break your goals down into smaller achievable tasks
3. Make a week by week plan on how you are going to achieve your goals
4. Answer these questions: what will you do if you get behind? get ahead? who will keep you accountable? what’s your plan if you get discouraged?

I’m going to try to add a new post every Saturday, so stay tuned. Topics to be discussed in the coming weeks: my new Household Management Notebook and how you can have one too AND week #2 (this was week #1 by the way).

Progress Report

18 Nov 2010 3 Comments

by Kandice Mann in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I have happy news! Everyday for an entire week now my dishes have been done, the kitchen sink has been cleaned, the counters wiped, and the cat has had food. I’ve also changed the dishcloth/ towel every other day (as written in the daily chore planner) and the kitchen floor has been swept most days (I missed this one a day or two).

Time Management

I am really seeing improvement, not just in the cleanliness of my home, but also in my time management. Crystal at  Money Saving Mom (a blogger I follow and a great inspiration to me and my own blog) has been doing a series on time management. It couldn’t have come at a better time for me.

2 weeks ago she had a guest post from Amy Andrews (another blogger that I want to start following) about using a “time budget.” If you are familiar with Dave Ramsey then you probably know about the money envelope system. The time budget uses the same principle only with your time instead of money.

I thought “wow, what a neat idea!” But then as the week continued and I thought about how I could divvy up my time, I realized there was no way it was going to work for me. With a toddler and a newborn, I can’t predict how much time I can devote to any activity in a given day. This really hit me hard on Tuesday morning and I thought about sending Crystal a message to see if she had any suggestions for me. But then…

I checked her blog and you will never guess what the title of her newest post was. Okay, I’ll just tell you: Q&A Tuesday: How can I be organized when I have a nursing baby and toddler? Ha! I think God played a role in this one. It fit my situation perfectly. She suggested for the mom to create a routine instead of using the time budget strategy. She talked about routine in some of her other posts in the Time Management series as well.

I got pen and paper and created my routine.

1. Wake up, short prayer asking God to guide my day, breakfast, family time until Kaylynn takes her first nap

2. Nap #1, Quiet time with God, workout with Kennedy, shower, fix lunch

3. Lunch, work on cleaning tasks as the girls allow

4. Nap #2, work on any non-cleaning tasks, fix dinner

5. Keep working on dinner, cleaning, or spending time with the girls, Kaylynn eats dinner- this is usually a stressful time in the house and we just take care of whatever or whoever needs the most attention at the time. We’re so happy when Daddy walks through the door, even though we usually have things under control by then.

6. Matt comes home, Kaylynn finishes her dinner, Matt and I eat our dinner, family time

7. Kaylynn’s bedtime, computer time (usually listing items on Craigslist and studying my calculus- I’ll save this explanation for a later post on budgeting), bed

This is the routine I created and of course when the girls need my attention, I stop and take care of them. I don’t stress if I don’t get everything done as long as I haven’t wasted my time. I haven’t been able to fit a workout in yet but I keep it in the routine because one of these days it will happen.

Report on My Plan

In a previous post I discussed a new plan for accomplishing my goals. Here’s how it’s going:

1. Follow the daily chore planner. I started off trying to accomplish everything on the to-do list for each day but I wasn’t getting everything done. At the end of the day I would get all the tasks done in the bathroom but the dishes would be piled up in the kitchen sink. The next day I would do the dishes, but I would be so behind that I wouldn’t have time to get much else accomplished.

So I stopped trying to get it all done. I started with just making sure the dishes were done and the sink was clean (think flylady). Then I added the counters. It took a couple of days to get this under control because of all the clutter. There is still clutter, but it’s what I call “organized clutter.”  Next I added sweeping the floor and feeding the cat (don’t worry, we’ve always fed the cat but usually that was Matt’s job and the cat is pretty good about making sure we know when he needs food). And today I managed to get the dinner table cleaned off (a hot spot for clutter) and we actually ate at the table tonight- a first in several months. My goal for next week is to catch up on laundry and get it added to the daily chore list.

So, overall I would say I’m making progress. The process is slow, but I’ll get there eventually.

2. Put on my apron when cleaning and start the day by reciting my Housekeeping Mission Statement. I have not been doing either. I found that I was constantly taking the apron on and off when I was pausing to take care of the girls. It just seemed tedious and wasn’t helping so I nixed it from my daily routine. When the girls are older, I might add it back in, but for now its gone.

As for the mission statement, I don’t have a printed version and our laptop died, so I wasn’t able to read it for a few days. When it didn’t affect how I was cleaning or managing my time, I didn’t add it back in. I do believe however that saying a short prayer each day has made an enormous difference, not just in my daily routine but also my attitude. On a side note, I still like my mission statement, and I plan on referring to it as needed.

3. Continue blogging. Well, I haven’t posted as often as I would like, but… I think you can judge this one for yourself.

The Challenge

If you are new to my blog, or you’ve forgotten, this is all about our journey together. So I want to know about your time management. Do you have a strategy that works for you? If so, share it with us. If not, think about creating a daily routine like I did, using the time budget system found at Money Saving Mom, or coming up with your own plan. Be sure to share any ideas or thoughts so we can travel this journey together.

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