Reclaim Your Weekends
Remember back before you had kids, when weekends were actually relaxing? Nowadays, it seems like weekends around our house are even busier than weekdays. While we try to be sensitive to the possibility of overscheduling our kids (and ourselves), things tend to add up quickly when you have four young’uns. With that in mind, check out this list of nine ways to reclaim your weekends…
1. Attend only one big event per weekend day – ‘Nuff said.
2. Honor naptime – Sticking to your weekday routine can help maintain your weekend sanity.
3. Build more chores into the week – If you piece away at things during the week, there won’t be so much left on the weekends.
4. Outsource whenever possible – In other words, don’t be afraid to hire someone to do the least desirable jobs.
5. Set aside unscheduled family time – Everyone needs time to just hang out every once in awhile.
6. Be more selective about social obligation – You don’t have to say “Yes” to everything.
7. Cut down (or cut out) your kids’ weekend activities – If you’re overwhelmed with extracurricular activities, the only sane solution is to cut down on them.
8. Avoid daylong projects – This isn’t always possible, but if you break big projects into pieces you can avoid weekend-killing marathon projects.
9. Leave work at work – This one is pretty much self-explanatory, though I still need to work on it.
[Source: Parenting Magazine]
Articles via RSS
Great ideas. What do you do when you work from home? As the parent of 3 girls and a boy we are busy also. We keep thinking that its going to get easier but it hasn’t happened yet.
Comment by Chris Gribble — Oct 24th 2006 @ 7:13 amI’m not sure exactly what you mean… What sort of work do I do at home, or how do I pull it off with four kids around? For the former, it’s mostly computer work — catching up on e-mail, writing, etc. For the latter, we have an upstairs office that I can go into and close the door. But I mostly just wait until after the kids have gone to bed to tackle things. Or, if it’s sufficiently mindless, I just do it at the kitchen table with the kids buzzing around.
Comment by dad — Oct 24th 2006 @ 7:41 am