In the midst of my husband and I planning our family's future, I have spent a considerable amount of time researching homeschooling methods. My favorite method by far is Charlotte Mason's. When I started reading her Homeschooling series it really opened my eyes into parenting and developing good habits in children. I felt significantly inadequate because of my own poor habits. There was this 'ah ha!' moment where I realized the best person to start trying these methods in developing new habits was myself.
I am a frequent offender of biting off way more than I can chew. For example, I decided I was going to keep the house spotless, work out about an hour a day, completely overhaul my diet, increase my piano practicing by an hour, make a garment a week, and read about six books at once. Let's just say that didn't go so well. I think it lasted all of a day, if that.
This past year I've really spent some time coming to grips with the only way to make permanent change: baby steps. The problem I have with them is that they feel like they take a lot longer than doing everything at once. I get impatient. The reality is, by doing everything at once no change is made so technically that method takes forever while at least steady progress is being made with the baby steps. Sometimes I feel like I learn slowly, and it's hard for me to just make up my mind to change something huge, do it, and have it stick. By having the final goal in the back of my mind, and following the steps to get there it made the prospect of change much more 'doable.'
Of course, I'm still a frequent failure even with doing the baby steps, but each time I catch myself it's earlier and earlier while the slump I get into is less and less. I'm hoping maybe one day there won't be a need to catch myself anymore, but I continue to fall down six times and get up seven while staying hopeful. I've noticed that sometimes the baby steps have to completely shift depending on what's going on in my life and schedule. If it's a big change, it either means back to square one, or certain ones transfer over well and it's just a matter of re-doing the rest.
When Mr. Hopeful got back from Afghanistan it wasn't too bad until we started trying to figure out how to work out our schedules so that they would match. This was kind of a circus because first his schedule was all over the place with post deployment requirements, then block leave for our vacation, and then the beginning of his new job while I'm working at mine. Now, after a couple months of being back, we've now hit a point of some modicum of stability in our schedules where I feel like I'm finally getting the chance to get my baby steps under way so that it fits into our lives without becoming a burden to either schedule. That in and of itself is a baby step. I've come to find that as I've gotten older I really do like a daily routine.
Right now the big focuses for Mr. Hopeful and I are: working out together, family devotional time, and dinner. The other day we had a discussion about what was and wasn't working and came to an agreement about our daily schedule. The focus points I listed are the mandatory 'us' times. Everything else I want/need to do has to work around those times.
Here's an example of my baby steps right now:
-Every day keep the kitchen sink clean.
-Every day do one small section of my quilt.
-Bible copy (will describe in a later post), NT reading, devotional chapter, and NASB Bible prep for induction Bible study method (another post to look forward to). This is a completed series of baby steps that's now formed my daily Bible study habits.
-About every three days do a blog post, and take all three days to work on that post and edit it to the point I prefer before publishing.
-Produce a weekly meal plan, and go grocery shopping once a week.
-Muscle training in the mornings (0400...yes, it hurts) and do my run when I get home from work at about 1445. Right now, one mile Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.
The one big thing missing from these steps are the goals I'm working towards, which I want to break down for future posts. I just wanted to show here how simple these steps can look.
When just starting out it's usually best to start with one thing, and then do that until it becomes automatic. Then add in the next thing. When I started doing it that's what worked for me, and I found rotating through different areas I wanted to work on kept things fresh. To give an example, one week the focus would be on a particular cleaning habit, the next week would be something surrounding exercise, the following week a small habit surrounding regularly doing something creative, etc. When I'd focus on only one area, like cleaning, it made me get really burnt out and lose my motivation to continue just because I'd feel like I was constantly cleaning.
I hope this all makes sense and makes the prospect of developing good habits much more feasible. This is something I want to do a series on and would love some feedback. Are there any tips or resources any of you use to develop or change good habits?
*Photography my own. Please do not use without my permission.*
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