MOTH 8 – OFF TRACK | thehamricks

April has been a rough month for MOTH in our house.

The first week was fine, but then on the sixth, Matt started feeling bad. It was the start of the four-day Easter weekend and Matt was home. The boys and I went to a birthday party in the middle of the day, and had another one that evening, so we were off schedule to begin with.

Matt was really sick all the next week and, I have to be honest, when he’s sitting in a recliner beside me, I’m more apt to stay in my recliner than to get up and be productive. My house stays cleaner when he’s gone, not because he’s messy, but because I actually work when he goes to work. If he stays home, I switch into veg mode and do little.

Yesterday was the first day back to normalcy, but not really. See, we have a massive trip coming up next week to and my parents arrive the day after we get back. (They are actually traveling here from the US on the same day we will be traveling back here from England.) I have a list of things to do that is quite extensive. For starters, I wanted to do the huge grocery trip to get the food for the next month as well as the snacks and such for the trip, but I wanted to go through the thousands of coupons I had on hand before. It took hours, but was very worth it, as I saved $67.13 on my bill.

Yes. I just wrote that. Sixty-seven dollars and thirteen cents!!!

I also wanted to cook for the next month so that while my parents are here we can spend more time visiting than working. Therefore, yesterday we spent two hours in the commissary and then an hour unpacking everything at home. Once that was done I sent the boys to do an hour of math each. They did not do well with this and complained the entire hour. They NEED their schedules. Usually they work for four and a half hours with no complaints but asking them to do one about killed them.

While they worked I prepared six pounds of meat for a meal I’ll be serving to a HUGE group of people. Aimee’s family and mine will converge on my house for a traditional German meal and I’m excited for our moms to meet! I had to get that job done before rushing the boys to the clinic for a well visit. We had two back-t0-back appointments at 2:00 and 2:30, but tennis practice was supposed to start at 3:00. Dr. S was AWESOME and got them both done by 2:40 and we made it to tennis practice on time. While I waited for Carson’s and Bailey’s tennis practice to end I sat and watched Hayden play with Parker on the playground. My heart smiles at their relationship.

As soon as 4:00 rolled around I rushed home, leaving Hayden at his 90 minute practice and started cooking dinners. Yes, dinners. I made calzones for last night’s dinner, but also prepared and froze four pounds of ground beef for tacos and made four pounds of meatballs for “Down Home Meat Ball Subs.” Matt picked Hayden up on his way home and we had a nice family dinner. First time in a while! (“Off schedule” means “fix your own dinner” most of the time so it was great to sit at the table with all six of us together, feeling well. Plus, all six people like calzones so there were no complaints about the food.)

After dinner and a game of dice which Bailey won by rolling 2600 on his last roll, I left the kitchen clean-up to Matt and went for a short run. 2.5 miles and it was WONDERFUL. Honestly, the only thing I like about the sun staying awake so late at night is running once Matt gets home from work. I prefer the winter, dark evenings, and miss Christmas very much! Here’s a side note that I may or may not have mentioned before: I’ve found that with my 2012 life (exercising 6 days a week, MOTH, Cooking by the month) I have a hard time doing all three. It seems I can get my exercise in but I can’t seem to get the dinner done. What I need to do is SCHEDULE a day to do coupons/shopping/cooking, but I just haven’t done that. So I end up cooking on a day we’re scheduled to do other things and it just hasn’t gone smoothly. Last year, exercising only three days a week was easy… adding three more days in has made it a lot more difficult.

After my run I spent time with my hand in a toilet, but that’s another blog for another day.

All of that to say that being off track has made the value of the schedule even more apparent. I miss it and need to get back on it, but something tells me it’ll be a while.

To be completely transparent, I’ve only check the boys chores four days this month. They’ve had to do them, but I haven’t checked them. That bothers Hayden because he’s doing work that he’s not getting paid for. In my defense, I can tell that the quality of work has decreased, making the following statement true: “You must inspect what you expect.”

I am eager to be back on schedule. Tomorrow, maybe? Regarding tomorrow, we’ve had to add a new schedule to the list. When we started MOTH back in January we had the following schedules:
1. MWF;
2. Tuesday/AWANA;
3. Thursday/PE.

Now I’ve had to add in:
4. MW/Tennis and
5. Independent schedule.

We use the Independent schedule on days when I need to work on other things but don’t want to just cancel school. I’ve replaced the subjects that I teach or work directly with one of the boys with something they can do independently. I LOVE these days because they remember how much they like me teaching them. In fact, when we did a few of these days in a row while Matt was sick, they started asking during breakfast if we could please go back to our normal schedule. They actually LIKE it when I teach them! Ahhhhh…. that’s my paycheck, right there.

So that’s what’s going on with our MOTH experience. Hope those of you trying it out are having success and finding joy in managing your homes well!

To read the other installments in the MOTH series see these links:

MOTH 8 – You are here.

MOTH Update – 2014