I love reading homemaker sites.  I've explored Flylady, The New Homemaker, Laine's Letters, The Genuine Profit of Home Sweet Home, Titus 2 (Managers of Their Homes), Hillbilly Housewife, Large Family Logistics, and many others.

What all the approaches seem to have in common is the recommendation of a...

(sorry, close your eyes if you are squeamish)...

schedule.

Ew.  I know.  

How many schedules have you drawn up in the course of your mommyhood?  I think it's about two dozen for me.  How many have you followed?  That's okay, you don't have to answer--and neither will I. 

Many homemaking whizzes recommend putting together a homemaking notebook.  Flybabies know it as a control journal.  The, uh...schedule...or daily routine (nicer word) is usually the first page in the notebook.

Unfortunately, I always misplaced my notebook. It was hardly ever at hand.  It was either buried under a pile on my counter; or in some other unpleasant, guilt-inducing pile; or maybe in a logical place for once, like on the bookshelf, where I wouldn't think of looking.  I tried putting routines in my homeschooling notebook, which I use more often, but still never referenced them.  And even if I did...I'm sorry, but a three-item morning routine simply does not convey what I need to do every morning. 

So I'm trying something different.  It's more detailed, easier to find, and...well, I guess I should say more ephemeral than a sheet that stays in a notebook...which means that sometimes I neglect to do it.

I'm very, very scatterbrained.  Can't remember what I'm supposed to be doing from one minute to the next.  And I have six children.  Can you say sidetracked?  So, on days when I know I have to stick to a plan--which really ought to be every day--I use Flylady's idea, the PODA (Parade of Daily Adventures), to walk me through it. 

It's pretty simple.  In the evening, I open Microsoft Word.  In a document saved as "PODA," I write a detailed list of every thing I have to do the next day, starting from the time I wake up.  When I say detailed, I mean detailed.  This helps me to stay on track. It's far too much detail for a schedule, so that's why I do it this way. 

But I don't write it all at once.  I keep the document open and add to it as items occur to me.  This empties out my "kaleidoscope of brain freight" (as Mark Heard once termed it in a song).  :) 

Next morning, I get up and start walking through the PODA step by step.  As I complete each step, I type "done" next to it.  I cut and paste events into the actual order in which they happened (rather than the order in which I planned for them to happen), adding in the unexpected.  This gives me a realistic birds-eye-view of how my days run. 

See, I'm quite idealistic, and if I strive to carry out my ideal day, I get cranky-ugly and downright un-mommy-like real fast.  It's better to surrender to reality.  Especially with a nursing infant in the house.

By the end of the day, the PODA has become my TA DA, another Flylady-ism.  (Get it?  Ta daaaaa!  Look what I did today!  Wow, I did a lot.)

The advantage of this approach is that it provides a template around which I can "tweak" our daily routines.  Events that happen every day get copied over to the next day's PODA, in the order in which they really happened.  If I keep it up long enough (I reason) I will come out with a schedule that actually fits, one that we will eventually be able to use in place of my step-by-step list.  As unbelievable as that sounds.

I guess it's akin to the budgeting approach of first writing down every single expense to get a good idea of where the money's going.  Only it's a "time budget" I'm working on.

What constrains my schedule considerably is training the children into new habits.  This slows me way down because I have to walk each one of them through their new routines until it becomes automatic for all of us.  Once we are all trained (what does that take, about a month?), my schedule will move faster and we'll be accomplishing more.   The good thing about taking my time through the PODA and doing each step is that I don't wind up at the end of the day exclaiming, "Bug never brushed her hair!" or "I forgot Buster's reading lesson again!" or "Whoa, Mopsy is playing outside in her p.j.'s."  Because I always drop the ball somewhere if I don't plod through the list, no matter how long it takes.  

The disadvantages are:

1. Having to run to the computer to check off the list, although this is not a hardship for me...not nearly as hard as keeping up with a written list.  I'm not likely to lose the computer!  And it's an ideal spot for nursing.

2. When DH comes home, he wants the computer, so I tend to slack off around dinnertime, which isn't good because dinner/bedtime is, quite frankly, busier than the rest of my day.  Late bedtimes throw everything off.  My husband is even less scheduled than me, and that's saying a lot.

Okay, I'm sure some people out there are shaking their heads saying, "Get a life!"  But if I copied my PODA/TADA here, you'd see life, the way it really happens, in the nitty gritty.  And I love the life God has given me!  He's teaching me to be flexible in the midst of it.  I may not measure up to the gold standard of homemaking, but I know he's pleased with my efforts, poor as they may be.

(I'll come back later and add links to those homemaking sites I've found so helpful.)