MOTH = Managers Of Their Homes

In theory, it’s supposed to streamline and organize your family.

Reality is another thing…or is it?

This year, I sat Anne down with me to help me work out our schedule.  You see, the main reason we’ve been using the MOTH is because we have 3 networked computers and a handful of students and I needed a way to coordinate everyone doing their Switched on Schoolhouse Language Arts and their DIVE math CD in order to do their Saxon, not to mention all the “earned” computer time and educational “stuff.”

We got the schedule down.  It looked like a dandy!  It was beautiful!  I was pleased.

A few things have changed since last year due to Benjamin graduating and working full-time, as well as Anne taking on a new job of sewing hunting decoys for MT Decoy and Cabela’s.  (She does this from home)

The first day of our schedule arrives.  We are poised.  Mom is excited and motivated to take on the days ahead!  The schedule has been gone over, checked and rechecked.  By the end of the first couple of hours, it becomes very apparent something’s amiss!

I knew that something was wrong when Emily came to me and said, “Mom, you forgot my SOS.”  Ok.  I could deal with that minor oversight.  Another child came to me and said I had forgotten to schedule them for a bathing!  Hmmm  Later, Elizabeth came to me and said, “Mom, you forgot my SOS, but put me down for reading three times.” (Poor girl. Imagine that! What a rough schedule when reading is your very favorite thing to do in life!)

Of course, I got the usual complaints, “Mom, can you reschedule us to feed and care for the chickens at, say, 7:00?  6:30 Is too early.  “No, sweetie.  If I did that, then you couldn’t eat breakfast.”  “Mom, I don’t like that my ‘free time’ is scheduled.  It doesn’t feel free if it’s scheduled.”

Back to the drawing board…or in our case, Excel.  I work our MOTH in Excel.  Since there are so many of us, it seems to work well.  Some great ladies at the Titus2 forum, since closed to any ol’ yahoo, helped me out to learn how to monkey with the cells to get them to conform to my likeness. At least that is the hope.  In the past, I color-coded everyone, but this year, I am trying something new by color-coding times in which a person is on a computer in order to keep it all straight! It also helps that each of our computers have names.  My computer is fondly called “Mother” or “Mothership.”  Since the other two computers came from our office, we lovingly named them after the people who used them, “Darren” and “Valarie.”

I finally made the unfortunate decision to delete Abigail (1) and Jayden (2) off the schedule since we were hanging off the edge of the paper and I couldn’t find my tape to print more pages to put together like a puzzle.  I didn’t want to attempt “landscape,” for this old brain of mine just couldn’t handle further confusion.

Well, after a week of stumbling through my first draft of the final schedule, or was that the final draft of the first schedule… I sat down and revamped it once again.

Of course, there is an exception to every perfect schedule and our exceptions are those of Thursdays when one son has guitar lessons, every other Wednesday, two sons work in the morning, they just began a job each afternoon at a neighbors “until the snow starts flying”, Monday’s Daddy’s home, so we have to remember that we may not always follow schedule on Mondays…shall I continue with the “exceptions to the rule?”  Of course there’s sick babies, and sometimes, sick mama’s.

We used to have a “loose” schedule.  Up by 8 o’clock, chores and fed by 10 o’clock then start school until lunch, finishing in the afternoon.  When baby number 9 was on his way, I knew a few things had to change:  One, we needed curriculum that freed me up a bit, and two, we needed more order and discipline in our lives.  However, many other benefits have come from this schedule:  I can make sure we are doing everything Daddy wants us to get done in a day, if laundry is sitting there, I am assured it will be taken care of “in it’s time.”  You know the old saying, “A place for everything and everything in it’s place?”  Well, using this MOTH schedule is like that.  We could say, “A time for everything and everything has a time.”

Tags: Abby, Anne, Ben, Bethy, Emily, Eric, Family, Jay, Joe, MOTH, Organization, schedule, school

Huffing and puffing trying to catch up!

Since I have been away, we’ve been picking chokecherries and canning syrup, freezing corn, shipping books, taking kids to and from work, celebrating our Abigail’s first birthday (!), dealing with attorneys, visiting a couple sick friends in hospitals, hauling water (remind me to share sometime about hauling water), hauling wood, making trips to the post office, paying bills, vending at the farmer’s market, etc., etc., etc.

I still have to finish freezing the corn and carrots and do more chokecherry syrup. YUM!

We are going to be entertaining our next door neighbors tomorrow afternoon.  They are new neighbors on their second marriage.  She is from England and has a beautiful accent.  She flew over to England to pick up her teenage daughter and a friend and brought them back here to stay for 5 weeks (this is the length of their summer break).  Then she will be accompanying them back to England.  The teenage girls brought us a box of “fudge” from England.  They came up on horseback, to the little ones’ delight.  Their accents were so thick, it was nearly impossible to understand them.  As Anne stood at the house doorway, she noted they sounded as thought they were speaking another language.

So tomorrow, if everyone is well, we will have them for lunch.  They told us that it would be very delightful.

For this morning, though, I am trying to enjoy my coffee and do some catching up.  This included passing through my blog and sharing only a glimpse of life at our home.  Busy as always.  I will try to get back another time to share about Abby’s doctor appointment and various other sundries…oh yes..and share our hauling water photos.

Tags: Abby, canning, freezing, hospitality

I figured out that we have sold about 500 Created To Be His Helpmeet books! Amazing!  I think a lot has to do with the fact that we have added a mere $1 to the base cost and that $1 goes towards ladies who cannot afford part or all of the cost for a book at CMOMB.

A few boxes ago, as I opened them, I noticed the cover was darker than normal.  I also observed the spine has a photo of Debi and Michael, which the other copies did not.  So I flipped open to the printing information and it read like this:

First Printing: December 2004 – 30,000
Second Printing: March 2005 – 30,000
Third Printing (revised): May 2005 – 30,000

When I emailed them, this is what they said:

“The revisions are minor. I think there was a couple of scriptures that were listed wrong and she added a couple of sentences to clarify the head covering controversy and some other minor misspellings and grammar changes. Nothing major but enough for the Library of Congress to force us to call it a revision.”

Tags: CMOMB, CTBHH

If you have emailed me in the last few days, I have, more than likely, not read your email yet.  I am quite backed up.  Thanks for understanding!

Ah well….another trip to the doctor’s.  At least it wasn’t the ER this time!  This time, my 3yo got a pretty little purple bead stuck in his nostril.  Why do kids do this?

They almost had to send us to an ear/nose/throat doctor because it was stuck so far!  They finally called in the doctor that had performed the circumcision on Rase to give it a try.  We joked…maybe he’ll recognize him.  Considering that Rase has only ever been to the doctors once before in his life, he did quite well.

My biggest regret…I wish I hadn’t of let them give him a sucker (for being good).  Really…he should not have been rewarded for the predicament he got himself in.

On a side note…Rase is child #9.  I felt pretty silly when they asked me his birth date and I couldn’t remember!  Am I getting old, or is it mommy brain?

Tags: health, Rase