Balancing Act

Balancing Act

Blogging Through the ABC’s Letter B:  Balancing Act

I don’t know about you, but life to me is a balancing act.  I have to balance my family time, my homeschool time, my planning time, my baking time, housework, and the list seems to go on.  Plus now I’ve got midwife appointments to add in there and our homeschool coop is starting back up in  a little over a month.  Stuff is happening and I’m balancing it all somehow.

Some tips I’ve learned over the years of being married and being a mama to many.  Let things go.  No not that Frozen song that is stuck in everyone’s heads.  But yes, let things go.  If you don’t have time to mop daily or dust daily don’t.  I don’t.  It’s not a priority to me.  My priorities have to come first. 

To start off this balancing act it should be a priority to have a daily time with God and a daily time with your husband.  Let me tell you, sometimes there are days that I don’t think I’ve said more than two or three words to my husband before the kids go to bed and we’re “alone”.  I’m tired.  No let me rephrase that, I’m exhausted.  But, I still have to take the time to have a conversation with my husband.  We talk about his day and we talk about my day.  We talk about schedules.  We talk about whatever pops in our heads.  Sometimes we’ll watch a movie.  But that is our time.  I’m not a morning person at all.  And it’s worse when I’m pregnant.  So, having time together in the mornings just doesn’t work for me.  Our kids go to bed at 8pm and normally they’re actually all in their beds and quiet by 9pm.

Another aspect of the balancing act is making sure there is food.  Not just food in the house but food on the table at appropriate times.  Sometimes I do awesome at meal planning and sometimes I don’t, but I try to make sure we always have something simple that I can fix for the kids. Primarily we have oatmeal with honey and dried cranberries or raisins for breakfast.  Lunch is leftovers a lot or we take corn tortillas and put meat and cheese on them for a quick lunch.  Supper is my big meal and I try to prep that or make sure it’s in the crockpot either at breakfast or at lunch while the kids are eating.  That way I’m not taking away from time for other things.

Probably the largest portion of my balancing act is homeschooling.  It takes up a lot of my day.  I have 9 children.  Six of them legally are school age and so I have to do so many hours of school with them per year.  This can cause me stress if I let it even though I know we’ll get it all in with plenty of extra.  I’m a worrier so I tend to worry about things(this tends to make my personal balancing act of emotions more difficult).  We do school three to four days a week every week.  I try not to take whole weeks off though we do around Christmas and we take at least a month off when children are born.  I have special needs children.  They have learning delays and disabilities with learning.  They take extra time and planning and maintaining at least a light routine helps them.

So, I need to actually have a routine scheduled, plus make sure it’s a doable one.  That means that things going wrong just aren’t on the schedule.  So they won’t happen right?  Wrong.  Throw another box onto that stack that I’m juggling!

I think the main point of this is to share with you that we all have our own balancing act.  We’re all balancing the things in our lives.  Once you figure out what your priorities for you and for your family are, you will find that the balancing act does get easier.

Don’t forget to check out the other posts in my blogging through the ABC’s series as well.