What Our Week Was Like! Smart or Not Smart? Not Really Sure, But We Did Have Fun!

A picture inside of one of our favorite local museums – there is a big treehouse in the middle of it!

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week were a little tough over here.  In fact, you may have noticed that we didn’t post anything on Monday or on Wednesday.

Well, it all started with the Be Intentional Month.  You see, we too are trying to Be Intentional about everything we do – prioritizing our daily tasks and running our day as smoothly as possible.  We also make a very tight schedule for ourselves in order to accomplish everything we need to do.

Here’s a quick look at our daily schedule.

• 5:30 am Alex and Cassie get up make our bed and get dressed to shoes.
• We start a workout around 5:45 with our 5 mins of stretching and breathing.
• Our workout is finished around 6:30
• Alex gets ready to work with his clients for the day and I make our morning green smoothies and get his lunch and vitamins together for the day.
• He’s gone by 7-7:15 after we have a time of prayer and then I take a shower and get ready for the day.
• Kids are up at 7:45 and I start my morning housework and breakfast to have it made by 8:30.  The kids get dressed, shower and do their chores by 8:30.
• Breakfast is from 8:30 – 9.
• We start what we call “group school” where all of the kids gather in the living room for our school subjects of Bible, Science, History, Geography, Character and Art.  We do a total of three of these subjects each day (Bible everyday and then two other subjects and rotate through so each subject is a few times per week).  We do this until 11:30-12ish.  There are a few minutes of breaks where I pop online for a short time and do a bit of blogging/research, get dinner defrosting and out (dinner by 10), rotate laundry, etc.!
• We then do a 20-min quick clean and eat lunch.
• The kids then begin their workbooks part of their school (English, Math, Penmanship, Spelling, Phonics) and I do preschool with the 4-year old until 1:30 – 2ish.  Then the 4-year old is done and gets to play.  The older kids keep doing workbook assignments until they are finished for the day.  That usually means that they are done sometime between 2:30 – 3:30 and then they get a break.
• I start blogging after preschool, so about 2ish and I only plan on 2-hours or less to blog and get done whatever I can get done, while helping the older kids with questions and lessons on their workbooks.  Which is why some days I get a lot in and other days not so much!
• I stop blogging at 4 pm and then work on more housework like picking an item or two from my house map, a thrifty task, etc.  I do this for 1-hour.
• I start making dinner at 5pm.
• Once Alex calls us to let us know he is on his way home, the kids and I do another 20-min quick clean, focusing on the fronts parts of the house that daddy sees first.
• We usually eat about 5:45 – 6ish depending on when Alex walks in.
• We eat and clean-up dinner by 7ish.
• We have a family devotional at 7ishh and time as a family until 8pm.
• Kids get ready for bed at 8pm and then get to read until lights out at 9pm.
• From 8-9, Alex and I do more blogging (plan out posts, downloads and other administrative type tasks) and work on our other businesses too.
• 9 pm, we start getting ready for bed with our nighttime routine (me cleaning off kitchen counters and loading dishwasher while Alex runs through the finances of the day for a quick financial check-in – this is usually about 15 minutes) and then relax the rest of the evening – whether reading, watching tv, doing our brain games (sudoku, crosswords, etc.) and wind down.
• Our lights are out between 10 and 10:30.

Some mornings, instead of working out, we will have work to do on our other businesses and try to get it done during that time early in the morning.

It is a busy schedule that requires a strict amount of “being intentional” in order to actually get it all in! So…. I realized that it was time for our kids to get their annual check-up at the pediatrician.  I had this bright idea of getting it all done at once as much as possible.

I scheduled their appointments back in December.  Their pediatrician will see up to two of our five kids at one appointment time.  So Monday, two kids were seen, Tuesday, one child was seen and Wednesday (yesterday) the last two kids were seen.  Well, I was actually very surprised with myself that I got my workout in, a good breakfast for the kids, the kids showered, dressed, teeth brushed, hair done and out the door by 9am everyday.  It is VERY difficult to get 5 little kids to cooperate and be out the door on time for the daily 9:30 appointments (I have no idea how moms get their kids out the door for school so early everyday – I guess this is one luxury we have enjoyed as homeschoolers ;)).  As it turned out, we were at the doctor until about 11:30 each day.  The kids easily twisted my arm into lunch out and then a field trip of some sort on both Monday and Wednesday.  This meant that it cut into my blogging time in the afternoon.  So, blogging only occurred on Tuesday afternoon.

But, since I went to all of the effort to get the kids ready and loaded into the car, it was sorta, kinda a no-brainer to take advantage and visit some museums this week! The kids were super excited to get to eat out twice and visit their two favorite places in our area all in one week!One museum we have a membership to as we do visit several times a year and the other one is a free museum!

BUT…. it threw our weekly and daily schedule way off.  We are far behind on work, school work, house work, and blogging.  We didn’t exactly make adjustments to take a few days off.

So was it a smart move to try and get 5 kids to the doctor as close to each other as possible?  I really am not sure as I felt like we did live there for the first half of the week and now I feel really far behind. But, their annual appointments are all complete too! Which is a good feeling (especially because they are all healthy and growing like normal weeds).

So what do you think, was it smart or silly of me to be so ambitious about the doctor appointments?