So, how exactly do you get it all done when there just doesn't seem to be the hours in the day?

Well, after much deliberation and looking for how others were making it work, I arrived upon a decision.  I'll walk you through this piece by piece because each part has its own set of challenges and fleshing this out may prove to be much more difficult than I am imagining in my little head.

First off, I intend to have a set wake-up time.  Or at the very least, a wake-up-by time.  Meaning, everyone, myself included, should be awake by such-and-such time.  No, there is no magic hour (at least not that I am aware of), so I won't bother telling you what time that will be for us, but I am beginning to see the merits of having everyone awake and ready for the day at a set time.  This is not something I have been readily convinced of in the past, so this, in and of itself, is a huge step for me.

Prior to breakfast are Room Chores.  This is something that USED to be intact for us, but has been allowed to slide.  No more! 

After breakfast will be morning chores.  If you'll remember my post on how we clean, this is where I intend to plug in our Daily Chores List.  So, if it is Monday, we will dust, do laundry, and water plants during this time.  It is my hope that all of this will be accomplished by 10:30 am.  This IS a magic hour, because HERE is where I am going to try to grab my precious teaching hour for Child #3.

And here is what I hope it will look like...

Bible with all the children.  Then, the bigs split off to do subjects that are independent for them while I take Child #3 and spend an hour doing her school.  Much of her "work" is fun stuff and art projects, so it is quite possible that she will continue to be occupied by a project well into the afternoon while I school the olders.

After her "official" school time is over, we will eat lunch.  Now, here is where I ran into yet another snag.  HOW do I do school AND cook???  Well, my solution is to assign simple weekday lunches to my 10 and 7 year olds.  This is the one thing I am still not sure about mainly because I grow rather weary of the same thing over and over, but I think once we consistantly do it, it will work well.  So, the idea is that whoever has lunch that day will break off from their studies around 11:30 or 11:45 and start their particular easy lunch.  And since I will be doing school with my little one at the dining room table, I can supervise the cooking as well without having to do it myself.

Next, we put the youngest down for his nap, do table chores, and start in on afternoon schooling.  It will be during this time that I will do the teacher-intensive subjects.  Once those are finished, there will more than likely be a bit more independent work to finish up.  I am cautiously optimistic that all will be accomplished somewhere around the 3:00 hour.

So, what do you think?  Sound doable???  I sure hope so!  This is a big step for us.  Never have we taken morning AND afternoon hours to do school.  Any thoughts?