Life 101 - Bootcamp Style

After tripping over a toy for the umpteenth time and finding the toothpaste uncapped again, I decided it was high time to do something.  Obviously, in our attempts to educate our spark plugs in Bible, math, language arts, and other subjects, one area of training was sorely lacking:  home management. 

Look out, spark plugs! 

Welcome to Life 101, also known as Mama's Bootcamp for Life. 

Between school work, park days, grocery shopping, piano teaching, and all the other little parts of life, the house work was sorely neglected.  I'm doing my utmost to beat back the Laundry Monster and limit my Dirty Dishes Display, but what I really wanted was to hit the pause button on life and get regrouped and reorganized.  The problem was, though, that I couldn't figure out how accomplish this without taking an entire week off of school to do so.

For a while, I toyed with the idea of doing exactly that:  one week, free of school work, for me to purge stuff and clean up all while hoping the spark plugs wouldn't come behind me and undo everything.  But that would send us a week later into the summer, and I wasn't convinced that the give and take would be worth it.

And then I had an epiphany.  Was home management something I wanted to teach my children?  Yes.  (Come to think of it, there was even an entire major at my college dedicated to this very area, called Home Economics.  Imagine that.)  Is it an important life skill?  Absolutely.  Would their future spouses thank me in the years ahead?  No doubt about it.    The answers to those questions settled the matter, and so I began formulating a new plan.

For an entire week in March, we will be cleaning, decluttering, learning to properly care for belongings, and creating permanent homes for what we don't donate, sell, or toss.  The spark plugs and I will be learning how to do this together, so that hopefully they'll learn some skills along the way (and stay occupied so that they're not undoing all the progress).  To keep it both fun and educational, however, I set some goals.  I'll share them below, more as an accountability method for me than for any other reason.  Lord willing, we will:

-begin each day with Bible, as we normally do
-research verses about good stewardship
-tackle one room each day, together
-eliminate at least 100 things from each room.  The 100 items can consist of trash to be tossed; unwanted toys do donate; borrowed things to be returned to their rightful owners; and even gadgets to sell.  I don't care how "The 100" exit the front door as long as they permanently leave our dwelling.  (We can work on math with counting and grouping all of this stuff, too!)
-learn to work as a team and conquer some of our argumentative, selfish behaviors
-have fun and enjoy the sense of accomplishment

This may end up a total disaster, but I think it's worth the attempt.  I won't know for sure that we'll meet all of the above goals, but unless we make a stab at it, we won't accomplish anything at all. 

I'll post later about the exact dates we hope to try this.  In the mean time, I'm going to go lace up my drill sergeant boots!