Here’s Tammy with her final post for The Family Project!
Week 5 has been a doozie. My hard drive decided to go kablooie Wednesday, and even though I have a smartphone – so I’m not totally cut off from the electronic world of wonder – I am SO glad that I have my trusty beautiful chocolate brown Aston filo – our puppy Rue likes it too.
So while I’ve been struggling to use my ancient, decrepit laptop
with it’s programs that no longer work, or auto-save, or are constantly shutting down with no warning (if you only knew how many times I have written this post), it’s non-existent battery life, and out-of-date address book and bookmarks, it’s such a relief to not stress about losing any of my important lists. I have come to the realization, after struggling to remember assorted passwords and log-ins (all automatic on my off-being-fixed (for free – even though it’s 2 months out of warranty – don’t ever bad mouth Apple to me) laptop, that it would be a VERY good idea to add such things to my ‘filing cabinet’ in the Aston.
So while my online life is crumbling to dust, real life is moving along relatively smoothly. We sat down as a family three times this week to go over our books. I’m still having problems getting through to Miss Madeline. She is quite stubborn about doing anything ‘my’ way when it comes to her planner. She is adamant that her teachers tell her what she/they need to write down and that’s all she needs to do. This week I really tried to impress on all three of the girls the idea of prioritizing; how if you break your homework/projects down into manageable chunks, note these chunks on the relevant days, and define and highlight the drop dead end date. Then if things go haywire (like they did for me on Wednesday and Thursday) it’s much easier to manage the chaos by being able to look at what is absolutely necessary to accomplish on a given day, and shuffle the less important things to other days. I showed them how I was able to do just that thing this week. Someone was not impressed with this idea.
Thankfully, I have two other proteges.
The idea of prioritizing seemed to make sense to them.
Or at least they said it did. Hard to say since they don’t really have anything they need to prioritize. In fact they don’t have much to write down except chores and playdates and the occasional test date. But they do it dutifully. They love me.
The jury’s still out on this one.
