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We are  excited to announce our online bookstore ~ peruse through our homeschool recommendations and look for our stocking stuffers, too!

How come I need to answer the same question 6 times? I really should just gather them all together and make a public announcement!

ds#2 What'cha doing mom?

You don't want to know.

ds#1 What'cha doing mom?

You don't want to know.

dd#4 What'cha doing mom?

You REALLY don't want to know.

What I was doing was a bit of maternal terrorism...

- New chore charts  BWA HA HA!!

I've been thinking of how to better arrange some chores that we need to get done regularly. It had to balance the workload for all 6 children. After months of mulling these were the result.

In the first circle are icky chores that will change daily: recycling, catbox, compost, garbage, wash lunch dishes, dry lunch dishes.

In the second circle I've divided up the main parts of the house so every child has an area to tidy daily during 'tidy up time' for that week. Mainly just responsible for getting the floors tidy and anything left on them put away. We are really bad at not putting bits'n'bobs on the floor. The dining room kid also clears the serving dishes from supper and wipes the table.  Floors also need sweeping daily and vacuuming at least 2x a week.

The outer edge has the children's names, the chores are listed on the middle circle, and the inner circle says either 'change daily' or 'change weekly'.

By putting the responsibility for these chores on them I can focus on other chores that need doing. Decluttering, organizing, etc.

I made them by cutting out 3 poster board circles each, writing on them, laminating them at the library, joining them with brad fasteners, and hanging them with blue sticky-tack. Did you know that when your laminator is only heating on one side you can affix the other side by ironing your project between two towels? I do now!

I felt I had to get this planned and implimented this summer as we have an exchange student coming to live with us for 3 or so months starting the end of August. I didn't want her stuck with the same chores our dd who is going off on exchange does daily ... dining room and garbage ... day after day after day....

Also it is time the littler 3 got some chores that were challenging. I know the older ones at the same ages were working a lot harder than the little ones currently are. Time to step up to the plate ! Not to mention with the older ones starting to move out I need the littles not to be so little.

I came across this great tool for planning my school year. The chapel calendar at the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese website can be viewed for any month and lists the saints and feasts for each. Even cooler ... clicking on the name of the saint or feast takes you to a page all about them (or it).

This will make planning the school year much easier as I can look ahead at  the days we need to book off and even do some pre-teaching about important days instead of being surprised by them. (And totally unprepared)

This last year has been by the seat of our pants. One of my co-workers has been on maternity leave and my 2 hours a week job turned into a minimum of 4 and often up to 12 hours per week. Those short shifts really bite into your days! She comes back in September and the librarian covering her fulltime shifts will come back to the supply staff list and take the pressure off of us part-timers who were covering her shifts and the front counter shifts of the librarian who was away. Didn't help when one fellow decided to retire too! It's a good thing I LOVE working in a library!

Adding to the confusion of this school year we also had an almost complete staff change-over at our umbrella school. Expectations and evaluations became much more 'time-consuming' and demanding. Good in that there is more accountability to actually complete our Student-learning-plans, and bad in that there is more accountability to actually complete our Student-learning-plans. They actually expect us to do the things!  Which is why we still have 20 days of school work to do here in JULY!

Our most seccessful school years have been when I have looked at our calendar and assigned each week we were going to do school. It really kept us on target. I'm looking and booking times to work and times that we need off for church and family obligations. I think this combined with the 'file crate system' being tooted about in hs'ing circles will smooth our year out. Since we usually plan on 30 weeks worth of work (3 terms of 10 weeks) I have three different colours of hanging file folders and have then labeled 'week one' etc.  Hopefully then I can assign work to the appropriate weeks in our file system. I'm looking forward to chopping up our schoolwork and assigning it to certain weeks.

Our biggest challenge is to get school done before lunch each day, very hard when none of us are morning people. I don't take any morning shifts at work so if we can get into a rhythm of chores and schoolwork that takes this into consideration it would be great.

Another big change this year was the full time assignment of a priest to our mission parish. We've gone from once a month Liturgies with Typicas inbetween to Liturgy every week. Also from rented, needing to be torn down each week, facilities to leasing a Ukrainian Catholic church and Manse that feels like 'ours'. Come and visit the website for St. Aidan Orthodox Mission!