Mike suggested to me last week that this family needs a more regular daily routine. Right now, we don't have one, to a degree that is pretty much appalling to just about everyone in our lives. There a few big reasons for that:
1) I can't keep to a schedule unless everything has a place as well as a time, and very little in our lives or in our apartment seems to have a place. We have one set of bookshelves, for example; we need many, many more. We also don't have enough dresser space now that BeanBean and BooBah have clothing that can't be folded into a postage stamp.
Four pairs of BeanBean's blue jeans alone seem to take up as much space as his entire wardrobe did when he was 8 months old, kwim? So things don't get put away right away, and then there's a mess that has to be dealt with when it interferes with something else and not "when it's on the schedule," and that drives me completely insane.
2) Mike doesn't get home from work at the same time every day. He said, for example, that he'd like for the kids to eat dinner every day at 6:00pm. In practice, this means that I will have to cook or at least start dinner every single day. That wouldn't be a big deal, except that I'm totally unable to cook dinner at the same time every day if I can't rely on the dishes and things being clean and available, and that's Mike's job (which he doesn't do unless I throw a fit at him or it gets in his way). He wants *me* to have a schedule, is what it boils down to, but he won't have to work within the boundaries of that schedule and that just pisses me off-- he should have to have a schedule, too!
3) Schedules make me tense, and tend to lead me to overscheduling. I can have my entire day worked out, but when that happens I start to schedule other things and it all eventually gets to be too much. By keeping myself schedule-free, I find that I'm unable to say yes to random projects, schedule too many appointments, etc. Having a few regularly scheduled events is fine, but if I have my whole day scheduled I tend to start overplanning and making myself crazy.
So here's my point: Do you have a family schedule? Is it fairly rigid or relaxed? Does it help, or hinder your life as a family, and is everyone in the family expected to respect the schedule? I can see a lot of good points to having one, but I think that it would require an awful lot more from Mike than he's willing to provide, and that trying to implement a schedule without his active participation and a lot of other things that we don't have (like places to put clean laundry away
) is absolutely pointless and a waste of time. Any thoughts? Ideas?
1) I can't keep to a schedule unless everything has a place as well as a time, and very little in our lives or in our apartment seems to have a place. We have one set of bookshelves, for example; we need many, many more. We also don't have enough dresser space now that BeanBean and BooBah have clothing that can't be folded into a postage stamp.
Four pairs of BeanBean's blue jeans alone seem to take up as much space as his entire wardrobe did when he was 8 months old, kwim? So things don't get put away right away, and then there's a mess that has to be dealt with when it interferes with something else and not "when it's on the schedule," and that drives me completely insane.2) Mike doesn't get home from work at the same time every day. He said, for example, that he'd like for the kids to eat dinner every day at 6:00pm. In practice, this means that I will have to cook or at least start dinner every single day. That wouldn't be a big deal, except that I'm totally unable to cook dinner at the same time every day if I can't rely on the dishes and things being clean and available, and that's Mike's job (which he doesn't do unless I throw a fit at him or it gets in his way). He wants *me* to have a schedule, is what it boils down to, but he won't have to work within the boundaries of that schedule and that just pisses me off-- he should have to have a schedule, too!
3) Schedules make me tense, and tend to lead me to overscheduling. I can have my entire day worked out, but when that happens I start to schedule other things and it all eventually gets to be too much. By keeping myself schedule-free, I find that I'm unable to say yes to random projects, schedule too many appointments, etc. Having a few regularly scheduled events is fine, but if I have my whole day scheduled I tend to start overplanning and making myself crazy.
So here's my point: Do you have a family schedule? Is it fairly rigid or relaxed? Does it help, or hinder your life as a family, and is everyone in the family expected to respect the schedule? I can see a lot of good points to having one, but I think that it would require an awful lot more from Mike than he's willing to provide, and that trying to implement a schedule without his active participation and a lot of other things that we don't have (like places to put clean laundry away
) is absolutely pointless and a waste of time. Any thoughts? Ideas?
: I think that I need one.... 
