Week 3 Cooking and Baking Week

Cook one day a month for meals to have on hand for your other weeks. (See Once-A-Month Cooking by Lagerborg and Wilson, Dinner's in Freezer! or Mega Cooking by Jill Bond for how-tos of freezer cooking.) This can be a great timesaving activity. Although you and your family will work very hard on cooking day, this system saves a lot of time on all other days. Another day bake several loaves of whole wheat bread, along with other breads such as muffins and bagels to accompany your freezer meals. This is week to make some extra-special meals and invite friends to dinner.

Week 4: Business Week (or other major focus area)

This is week you focus on your business if you have one. Read related books, work on marketing and those important extra projects you can't usually fit in. Your children will be doing independent study, helping with business or just enjoying their free time.

Week 5: Repeat cycle or go into another of your focus areas.

You may choose to alternate your weeks like this.

Week 1: Homeschooling Week 2: Cleaning and Cooking Week 3: Homeschooling Week 4: Extra Curricular for Mom (or business activities)

Many are already dividing their days into:

Morning: Homeschooling Afternoon: Business Evening: Cooking, Laundry, Cleanup

Or you could divide your week:

Monday: Homeschool Tuesday: Cleaning Wednesday: Homeschool Thursday: Shopping/Cooking Friday: Homeschool

No matter what focus of each week, never neglect responding to your children and their needs. With many responsibilities, it is even more important that we includes more prayer, Bible reading and meditation on Scriptures. I've found that when I do this my productivity goes way up. It can't be explained. It is a supernatural law.

You should also write it down and communicate it to everyone in family. My wife and I own a speaking, training, and consulting business. We speak and train on human behavior, leadership, and communication topics. Everything we have learned in business world says two things: 1) Control and fear tactics create minimal performance, and

2) Positive reinforcement creates high-level performance. We teach business leaders to use positive reinforcement to inspire their teams. Yet we sometimes find ourselves tilting more towards fear and intimidation when working with people we love most -- our children. Our negative disciplinary approaches are not usually result of poor understanding. Instead, they come from fatigue, stress, and strong emotional ties. A system also helps to remove stress and fatigue from equation when handling disciplinary issues.

Do work to create pre-defined rules, expectations, and definitions of consequences. Then you will feel less stress and frustration as you work to guide, correct, and instruct your children. You’ll be free to focus on relationship issues rather than on task issues.

You may use this article for electronic distribution if you will include all contact information with live links back to author. Notification of use is not required, but I would appreciate it. Please contact author prior to use in printed media.

Copyright 2005, Guy Harris