Managers Of Their Homes (MOTH)

The day my husband came home and found me hiding under a pile of (clean) laundry on our bed, we knew something had to change.
In the fall of 2007 I had a foot-dragging second grader, a shy kindergartner, an ornery three-year-old and a clingy baby girl. Add homeschooling on top of that, and let's just say it was the straw that broke this mommy's already weakened back.

There were two major problems: my first student just was not a self starter. And neither was his mom. We had daily battles over schoolwork, and he was winning them all. Therefore, I was losing the war. It went something like this: I would roll out of bed after my husband and three boys (I was still nursing all night long, co-sleeping with the little princess). I would show up on the scene sometime during or after breakfast. I take a long time to wake up, unlike my husband who is perky from the start. Around 9:30 or 10 I would dutifully have my son take out his math book and show him the page to complete. He would dutifully sit in the same spot for hours on end and simply do nothing. There were times when I would be cooking dinner, and he'd still be sitting there. We were accomplishing next to nothing. I was terribly discouraged. Homeschooling was something we had planned on doing since our oldest son was a baby... my dream was turning into a nightmare, and I saw no way out. Except crawling under a pile of laundry.
I didn't have many friends where we were living, and especially an absence of homeschool companions. Thankfully, I did have a lot of homeschool friends elsewhere. I turned to one -- Anna -- out of the many I had available. That was a total God-thing.
She lovingly rebuked me. She reminded me that the year prior, she had told me to get Managers Of Their Homes. I had ignored her advice. When she had first told me, I illogically thought, "I'm not organized. That just wouldn't work for me." That, my friends, is the equivalent of saying, "My marriage is falling apart. Why go to counseling?" DUH.
I immediately plopped down the $30 for MOTH. It was the wisest decision I ever made for our family. Anna is da bomb.
Earlier in my crisis, my wise, loving, desperate husband had sat me down to try to sort out my scheduling issues. I was asking him for guidance. He's such a good doobie. I just wanted to be like him: he gets up early every morning to read his Bible, he finishes everything he starts, he's a hard worker. I was the opposite of all these things. He said to me that by staying up late and sleeping in every morning, I was behind the kids from the start of the day. By the time I woke up, they were raring to go (three boys under 7? You betcha!) I was annoyed with them before we even got going and was just never able to catch up.
Going to bed early? Waking up early? These were novel ideas of which I had never pondered. Wisdom. Such wisdom. Obvious wisdom, but for a head-in-the-clouds girl like me, complete revelations.
MOTH arrived in the mail, and I dug in.
It changed our lives.
For those of you who are born with a day planner in one hand and a stop watch in the other, this system will only reinforce your already awesome ability to be organized and productive. For the rest of you who are like me -- Type C personality, slovenly, clueless -- this will change your life. Being unorganized is the PERFECT reason to purchase this kit.
Here's how it works:

• You read a book where Terri Maxwell (read: Mother of All Geniuses) takes you step-by-step through the whys and hows of scheduling your life. It was as if the clouds parted, sunshine fell upon my luxurious brown locks, and angels sang the "Hallelujah Chorus". Much of what she said was terribly obvious but had eluded me my whole life.
• You follow her steps precisely and develop a plan for your family.
• Using the materials supplied, you create a master chart for your family to display for a constant reminder.
• FOLLOW THE SCHEDULE.

Since implementing this system four years ago, we finish every school subject every day, with possibly the exception of three or four days in a school year. You might think I am exaggerating. I am not. I don't even need to post the schedule anymore. It is so ingrained in our family that even my children know when it's time to switch subjects, start chores, eat snack. I am finished with the teaching portion of school before lunch.

Here was one of the biggest keys to the mystery of why we were accomplishing so little before: I was letting my son take all the time he needed to finish his math. That meant we barely had time for Language Arts and almost never got to history or science. The key is you give your child a set amount of time to do a subject. If they have not finished in that time, you move on to the next. My children now know that if math isn't done by 9:30, they will have to work on it that afternoon, thereby missing some free time. My schedule isn't affected at all. Losing free time is a great motivator. And on the days it's not, no skin off my teeth, because we've already finished science and Language Arts.

Here's another gem: rather than creating more stress, scheduling takes a huge burden off my shoulders and allows us to accomplish so much more than we could without a schedule. If you find yourself stressed, harried, angry and overwhelmed, probably you are not doing what God has for you. Terri says, "You can absolutely not do more than there is time in the day, but you can absolutely be sure there is time to do everything God intends for you to do." God would never put more on your plate than is possible to accomplish. If you are in this boat, I would venture to say you have activities in your life that are not God's priority for you. Scheduling actually makes your life less busy.

Terri encourages you to approach scheduling prayerfully, and gives you every tool in this kit to be successful. This was the single most important item I've ever purchased for our homeschool. It saved our dream from dying, and it is now thriving.