Revised Schedule

Are you impressed? You should be. :) I spent a lot of time getting this all figured out, fitting it all onto one neat little chart. (If you can't make out the words that's fine with me - you don't all need to know what I 'should' be doing. :) It doesn't work out so neatly in real life, but that's OK. It doesn't have to. It's just intended as a guide so that we have some structure and order to our day. And it does work for us - so that even on days like today when I just don't feel like doing much, by default a lot still gets done. The older kids can flow through their schedule pretty independently, only coming to me if they run into difficulties. So even on days when I really am not able to pull this all off, they can still keep going. I had the schedule all made up a few months back, but life keeps changing - Nadia's awake and nap times are different than they were back in August, so we had to make a few adjustments for that, as well as ironing out some of the imperfections of the original schedule. A common question I get is "How do you get it all done?" I'm not sure what is meant by 'all' sometimes but I think the answer is that I don't. There are a lot of things that we just don't do. Things we used to do. Things we'd like to do. We prioritize and try to focus on what's most important and what we can enjoy doing together now. We all work at what has to be done. I'm sure that's why God does not send us all our children at once. By the time we get to this stage we have lots of helpers. (That's why we have all these kids, you know, so we don't have to do any work. :) Most importantly, we can't go on our own strength. God promises to equip us with what we need to serve Him, and He is faithful.
Now Nadia has her meals at the same time as the rest of us. I like it because it frees up time, but it does make for noisier meals. You wouldn't think that you would notice the difference made by one wee girlie's voice amongst all the others, but she has her way of making her presence known. She fits right in, I guess. Nearly every evening right after supper Gerald and I head out for a walk while the kids clean up. Yep, we just walk away from the noise and the mess and come back when it is pretty much cleaned up. I quite like it. My tongue gets as much exercise as my legs, as I fill Gerald in on the ups and downs of the day and attempt to meet my quota of 10 000 (or is that 100 000?) words per day. He's a good listener. But then, he's had a lot of practice.
Here's a picture I took at Ingrid's house this summer and have been meaning to share with her. This is a pretty little garden shed in her back yard. We can all use this bit of summer now, can't we?