Monday, February 13, 2012

Schedule? What Schedule?

Good Morning!  OK, it's probably clear to everyone by now that I am not organized nor scheduled.  I'm not even sure that I could ever become that way again.  There was a time when I was.  When the children were much younger, I was REALLY organized.  I had a planner with all of the appropriate sections and calendars where each activity was color coded with a different colored pen.  We separated our dirty clothes as we took them off and each load had a certain day of the week.  We had a scheduled time for getting up, going to bed, eating meals, starting school, etc.  The house was cleaned on a routine basis.  It all worked really well. 

Then we moved.  And it all didn't just go slowly downhill.  It dropped like a rock.

My husband's parents were aging, his mom had had two strokes and was consequently disabled.  His dad just couldn't work and keep up with the place, which included a 100-year-old house and 4 1/2 acres.  So we bought it and they began to live with us. 

That was the end of the organization.  All of my stuff remained packed up and was only gradually integrated into the house, which made doing some things very difficult, like:  packing away papers, clothes, or anything else that needed storing.  Cleaning could only be done as a room was available and, since most of the stuff belonged to my in-laws, I was reluctant to let the children clean as I had at our own home.  We went to bed early and got up early.  They went to bed late and got up late. There was no room for anything and nothing had a place.

Then, as the children got involved in 4-H, we started adding animals.  The first things, chickens and rabbits, didn't really do too much to our schedule.  Even the heifers my children showed didn't change things too much.  The show schedule itself played havoc with our fall schedule.  Now we are, at least a little, what we had so desired when we first moved:  a working farm, and we love the life.  But it does not lend itself well to schedules.

Believe it or not, I sat down the last week of December and scheduled out soapmaking, cheesemaking, blog posts, cleaning, school, meals, shopping, etc.  I made it a little over halfway through January and "then came the rains.  And with it my troubles with the" schedule.

For instance, we have a small trench dug in the goat's pen to help drain the water.  The problem with this is that it has to be maintained, i.e. dug out, on a regular basis.  If we have no rain or just a little rain, this is easy and not very time-consuming.  But when you get a lot of rain on a daily basis, or on most days, it is more difficult.  So, during the last month, I have been spending quite a bit of my time trying to keep this open. 

Since we don't use a dryer, the laundry schedule has also taken a direct hit from the rain.

Then you have the day one of the puppies got into something that caused her face to swell and required an emergency visit to the vet.

And the day the heifer got loose and it took all of us over half an hour to catch her.

And the day the goats got through the fence and had to be rounded up and the fence repaired.

And the day I found one of the goats limping and had to treat and bandage her leg.

etc., etc., etc..

What have I learned through all of this?  I'm not really in control of my schedule.  Yahweh is.  And I need to be open to whatever He chooses to bring my way, even the customers who stop by for eggs and end up staying 2 hours talking and trying to learn how they can get started on becoming more self-sufficient.  Does this mean that I don't need to bother trying to plan or schedule?  No.  It simply means that I don't need to get upset when my schedule doesn't go as I have it.  It also means that some days it's just easier to change the date at the top of my TO DO list rather than to completely copy it over.

May Yahweh bless you in this new day and may you welcome all he has planned for you in His schedule!

Laurie

1 comment:

heatherdmc said...

He surely is in charge of our schedules, isn't He? We can make a long list of chores to do, but He can change that in a minute!