Whether you feel ready or not for this season, let’s get our hearts and homes set up for the best success for this new school year. Remember that successful learning begins in the home. We are the examples to our kids and we do so much teaching right at home. How can we support their learning at school?
Prepare Your Heart by Trusting God
It is so important to teach our children that although we are not physically with them, God is. They can pray anytime they feel lonely, distressed or afraid. Here are 4 steps on how to teach your kids to pray. And we as parents should pray daily for our kids as well.
Prepare Your Home by Prioritizing Your Values
I have a large framed corkboard in our kitchen. It is our family planning board. It has a small whiteboard on one side and a family birthday calendar on the other. The middle has a large calendar and a small sheet with daily activities.
Big Calendar
How can you meet your priorities this month? On your main family calendar (I still use a large paper calendar), schedule in all of your priorities like dates with your husband, and your children; appointments, school activities; helping neighbors, etc. You may have to resist requests that do not fit your priorities to keep room for those that do.
Daily Schedule
I post a separate page with our daily activities, work schedules and other consistent activities so people know where we all are.
Appointments
Try to schedule all your routine appointments, errands, and outside events on the same day each week/month whenever possible. This routine helps me not miss important appointments and helps the kids know which days they may be pulled out of school.
Interruptions
When heart issues arise, stop everything to deal with them. Always bring your children back to the Word of God. This will have an eternal impact. Showing and modeling relationship priorities is important and shows that they are your priority.
Preparing Your Home: Chaos vs. Perfectionism
Our personalities tend to fall somewhere between complete chaos to total perfectionism. Different seasons may find you on one spectrum or the other.
Chaos produces a paralyzing overwhelm where you don’t feel you have a handle on anything. Clear the chaos in the home by getting rid of as much as possible. Clear the panic in the mind by writing things down and creating manageable small steps. Stop, pray, and get rid of or fix that chaotic thing (attitude or activity) that is paralyzing you.
We can also become paralyzed by perfectionism and never start unless we think we are perfectly ready. We might need to adjust our high standards and stop procrastinating. We need to let go of unrealistic expectations and the heavy burden of perfectionism and give ourselves grace to begin.
For either personality press through the paralyzed feelings, take time to research or prepare one thing at a time. plan, prepare, and pray— Schedule everything in so you do not miss a thing and you have a plan. Ask God daily for wisdom, direction, and strength. You will find these in His presence.