The line leader has a new job

Writing about our line leader system yesterday caused an expansion in job description.

Those of you who have been in our home know that our kitchen is very little. I am not complaining, because I get very excited that we have such blessings as running water, a ready heat source, etc. A vast portion of the world does not own these things! But teaching our children how to be proficient cooks, keepers of the home, etc. does not work so well when all our children our gathered in the kitchen at once. There is barely room to breathe when that happens.

So the line leader now has the job of kitchen assistant as well. They are SO EXCITED!! Wolf went straight to the calendar to see when his first day would be. The kitchen assistant will be the child who~~you guessed it :) ~~helps in the kitchen that day: helps prepare the food, sets the table, does the final kitchen-clearing after all the dishes are gone, helps load dishes into the dishwasher, etc.

While I'm on the subject, I thought I'd share the title of a book that is blessing and encouraging me. It's called Managers of Their Homes by Steven and Teri Maxwell. The subtitle is "A Practical Guide to Daily Scheduling for Christian Homeschool Families." As you can probably guess at this point, I have read many books on the subject of home management (while certainly not claiming to have perfected the practice but God certainly is faithful to meet us where we're at!) and this one is helping me to bring many different facets into a running whole. I recommend it. Useful tidbits I'm loving:

~ The importance of putting Jesus at the center of the day. What I appreciate about their approach, however, is that, unlike many other Christian books on the subject, they do not insist on waking up and doing this. The expectation is that the reader will ultimately find that early morning time frame to be the most girding, so to speak, but the emphasis is on the doing, not so much on when that happens. This reflects their overall approach, which is to encourage the reader to:

~ Just do something. Don't feel like you have to make all these changes all at once. Start small and let the results speak for themselves.

~ Scheduling your children and home will bless you. Oh, how I can attest to this! When a written schedule is in place, the day more often than not flows so much better. Everyone knows what to expect, mother and father included. So often, we wait until there is chaos brimming up before changing activities or even planning for the next part of the day. A schedule frees up the day in order that the home be the place of love and encouragement that God meant for it to be. In fact, the author states outright that as many decisions as possible should be made before the day ever happens. God intends for us to delight in our children but when children and their drama are in control of the home, the end product is certainly not delight!

~ Changing activities more frequently helps to prevent the aforementioned chaos from brimming up in the first place. This particular point right here SO COMPLETELY ROCKS. (I'm laughing at how certain friends of mine are probably going, "Dang, this blog has lost me. How can "changing activities more frequently" and "SO COMPLETELY ROCKS" go in the same bullet point?)

~ A half hour of attention paid to something every day will result in progress. The Maxwells emphasize that "plowing through an activity until it's done" often turns into a source of chaos and frustration. Steady progress for a half hour every day ensures that very thing: steady progress. I love this point.

~ A certain piece of Scripture I had not seen in relation to this subject of homemaking has been mentioned several times: "Do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule, a little here, a little there." Isaiah 28:12

~ The authors write a section on baby scheduling but for those of us who don't schedule our baby's feeding times, etc., the authors are extremely respectful and include testimonies from parents who do it both ways. This quality is rather unique, as the issue of baby-scheduling can be a rift between those of different parenting philosophies.

~ Practically all the parents in this book have way more kids than me. 8+ children. Very helpful and reflective of the concepts such as those in Michael Gerber's E-Myth books (I think I'm thinking of the right author) which discuss how important it is to plan your business as it will look when it is the ultimate size you plan for it to be, not the size you currently have. Systems don't matter as much when there is 1 child in a family, but as more children are added, this becomes more useful and even vital.

~ Finally, at the end of it all, the authors include forms and samples of all of the systems written about in the book. I haven't gotten to that part yet.

This book is divided up usefully into sections pertaining to teaching chores, scheduling priorities, unexpected challenges that pop up in life, etc. If you are not a Christian or a homeschooler, this book may overwhelm you with its Biblical emphasis and even seem strange and foreign. If you are a Christian but not a homeschooler, the section pertaining to homeschooling is just that~~a section. It is not foundational to the information inside. I'm excited this book came into my life.