Thursday

Homeschool Mom's Boot Camp Day Two: Planning to Prioritize



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.

6 comments:

  1. Wow, you're working on a lot of areas. I love the printable. Thanks for sharing.

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    1. I'm not really working on that many. Just making sure I'm growing and thriving in the most important things and trying to keep instilling new habits.
      When I stop focusing on growing and improving, it doesn't take me long to fall farther behind than I was!

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  2. Thank YOU For those awesome printables!! You are the organizational-goddess! LOL

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    1. Stop it! You're making me blush!

      Actually, I'm so organized because I'm a wreck if I'm not. It's seriously embarrassing!

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  3. This is just great, Chelli! I'm so happy for you to be so purposeful--it brings such blessing, doesn't it?! And I love the ideas with the Honey I Shrunk the Kids movie. I actually just picked that movie up at a thrift store for a quarter--our kids have never seen it either. Love your ideas to make the experience memorable!

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    Replies
    1. Thanks! I love having purpose. When I lay my head on the pillow at night, I know that I've tried my best instead of feeling guilty and defeated! I hope your family enjoys Honey I Shrunk the Kids as much as my crew did!

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