Earlier this week I talked about the six areas
that were my priorities: God, husband, children, home, me, and extras. Today I’m
going to show you how I am working on being intentional in each of these
categories.
First, for each priority you make an appointment.
That’s right you schedule to do something solely focused on that person or
thing. The goal is accomplish all of these appointments in one week.
For example, my priority schedule for this week
looks like this:
God: Finish lesson for Ladies’ Bible Study BEFORE
class. I’m usually scrambling at the last minute or even while we are sitting
in class!
Husband: Play a round of 20 Questions after the
kids are in bed. I wanted to do something fun with him, so I’m going to come up
with twenty questions to ask him, serious ones mixed with silly ones. Now I can
find out why he always sings this one church hymn under his breath whenever he
is helping me clean house!
Children: Have a Honey I Shrunk the Kids night.
When we were at Disney World the kids loved the play area based off of this
movie. While they were playing I realized that they had never seen the movie
and for that matter I hadn’t seen it since it came out in 1989!
Home: Clean off all surfaces in the kitchen and
dining room. Countertops are not storage units!!!
Me: Exercise. I was doing pretty well with this
until we went to the Magic Kingdom. Since coming home I have not gotten back
into the swing of things.
Extra: I divide this one into two categories, blog
and Come Fill Your Cup. I schedule certain days to work on the blog and certain
days to work on my duties at Come Fill Your Cup.
For accountability purposes…
here is how my Honey I Shrunk the Kids night went
with the crew.
I took them with me to the store where we picked
out tiny foods to eat for supper. We were going to pretend like they had been
in the shrinking ray. I made tiny cheeseburgers (sliders), tiny cheese pizzas
using English Muffins as the crust, and tiny hot dogs using Little Smokies
wrapped in half of a crescent roll.
For our side we had little tiny carrot sticks with
ranch dressing that was served in communion cups.
We ate off of saucers and drank out of 3 ounce
paper bathroom cups. And to round it all out, we had tiny cookies for dessert
(from those 100 calorie snack packs).
I know it wasn’t the healthiest food, but it was
all I could think of on short notice and short time!
After dinner (and putting Monkey to bed), we
cuddled up on the couch and watched the movie. It was just as big of a hit as I
knew it would be!
To help you out and as a help for me, I created
this printable to keep track of your priorities and what you want to schedule
each week.
Same priorities as mine:
Blank priority boxes:
I printed mine out, laminated it, and then fill it
out each Sunday for the coming week with an extra fine tip dry erase marker.
Underneath the priority boxes is a monthly goal
box. This is where you can write in one thing that you need to make a habit, such
as Pam’s Boot Camp goal of starting school by eight o’clock every morning. This
goal can be about one of the priorities above, something about your home
school, or something totally different, but this goal is going to be a focus
for about a month. Isn’t that how long it takes to form a habit? 30 days? My
monthly goal is going to be starting our home school by 10 every day. My
children and I are obviously lazier later sleepers than Pam’s crew!!!
Now we’ve got our priorities, we have a plan to be
intentional about our priorities, and we have a printable to make it all neat
and organized. Let’s head into battle!
Loving the fruit of living my life based on the
right priorities in the tree house,
Chelli
P.S. All of those lines underneath the priority
boxes and monthly goal box…I’ll be talking about those tomorrow for Homeschool
Mom’s Boot Camp Day Three.
