With the kids making their way back to school / kinder, I have been revisiting the organisation of different elements of our household. I find that the organisational processes we use need to develop with us as our family develops. They are pretty much a constant work in progress.

I am currently taking stock, to see what is working, what needs tweaking and what needs to be completely overhauled.

What is working

Let’s start with the positives shall we! The arrangement we have for school bags, hats and library bags is working well for us. You can see more about how we organise the school gear in this post Getting The School Gear Organised.

Our night time routine works really well, setting us up for a clean slate each morning. You can see what we do in this post 10 Things To Do Before You Go To Bed. Simple things like setting the table for breakfast makes such a difference to the start of our day.

The kids routine charts work really well and feedback from readers is that they have worked for them too, which is great to hear.

What needs tweaking

In the post, Kids Chores – What My Kids Do In The Morning the above table is what our kids were doing. The jobs each child does need rotation and there are some other things I am expecting the kids to do now, which need to be added.

I also need to make a better visual representation of this for the kids. It probably needs to be split into two charts one for the older kids and one for the younger kids.

The homework area we have still works very well, but the way we do homework now with four in school needs tweaking. Who can work where, where am I spending my time when, are things we are now working out. It will be a few weeks I think before we really find our feet here and tweak it, so everyone is okay with the way it is working.

What needs to be completely overhauled

We changed last year from this system to a sort of hybrid, but it needs to be overhauled again. Each year it seems that there is more technology to deal with. As kids get older I realise there are different needs to take into account than when they are young.

We are trying a few things out at the moment, again to see if we can come up with something that we are all okay with. But with this area, I will certainly be making sure there are firm boundaries around homework completion, sharing of technology etc.

We have just recently overhauled our drop zone as well. If you have signed up to the Planning With Kids newsletter (you can see the latest edition here), you would have seen this already today!

We have made a dedicated area, were the kids need to bring their technology before they go to bed – kindle, iPods, mobile phone all those types of things. For some of the kids it is not a temptation to have them in the room, but for others – they might never sleep!

How is the organisation in your house – are there areas that need tweaking or a complete overhaul?

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Revisiting Areas Of Household Organisation is a post from: Planning With Kids

In the survey I conducted last year, I asked you to share your biggest struggle with family life at the time. Overwhelmingly the most common response was around the dilemma of balance. Here is just a selection of the responses:

• Balance – juggling work, family and home duties.
• Balance and being a better mum
• Balance and having ‘me’ time
• Balance between work and home
• Balance of work & family time
• Balancing demands of breastfeeding with keeping an active toddler engaged and happy.
• Balancing different needs of each child – naps, school pick ups, homework, sport, meals, housework
• Balancing everyone’s needs
• Balancing having a life and having an organised house.
• Balancing everything and feeling like I’m on top of it all!
• Balancing kid & parent needs
• Balancing the different needs of two children
• Balancing the needs of all family members, including extended family
• Balancing things to be fair to all parties & dealing with anxiety issues for one child / sensory issues for another

For some of these balance issues I have strategies that I use to make it easier, like:

• How To Entertain A Toddler While Breastfeeding A Newborn
• Spending Individual Time With The Kids
• Mum’s work plan
• 10 Cleaning Tips To Get The House In Shape Quicker

I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I do have a question:

Is Work / Life / Family / Balance something we should set as a goal?

Personally I spent a lot of last year thinking, fretting and aiming for balance. Being a planner I liked to think I could divide my time evenly amongst the things that were important to me:

• My kids
• My partner
• My family
• My friends
• My work
• Me

Life doesn’t serve out demands evenly, so there were and are still times when all these areas need my attention, yet I simply couldn’t split it that many ways. Often I would feel like I was failing and very disheartened with “my time management” or “my decision making” skills.

Then in October I read this article by Sarah Wilson, I find what happy women get right and what I read let me breathe a massive sigh of relief:

It’s estimated 1.3 million people have been involved in studies across the first world that confirm the same grim fact: as women’s life circumstances have improved, their happiness has plummeted. The studies conclude the reason for the paradox is not just that “having it all” – career, kids, access to the rowing machine at the gym – has meant “doing it all”. The more important factor is that women have got it into their heads they should be able to do it all. And in perfect balance (I speculate men are, increasingly, feeling the same; it’s just not reflected in the studies yet).

Somewhat in response, UK pop-trend researcher Marcus Buckingham took a different tact and investigated, inversely, what the happier women were doing differently. And his conclusion was this: they strove for imbalance. Messy, all-over-the-shop imbalance.

These happy women, he said, realised that balance was impossible (and therefore stressful) to achieve, but also rather boring. Instead, they “tilted” towards activities and commitments they liked and found meaningful. Scanning the “sad female lawyer” study I found the happier blokes did the same. They were more likely to take breaks at work for personal activities, which I took to mean play golf and eat lunch away from the office, and for simply relaxing. Which I read to mean, not for balancing out an excel sheet of life order.

I didn’t read into to this article that it meant I could just do as I please and put all the things I like to do first and not worry about everything else. It made me think about what was I really trying to achieve with balance. Was I aiming for:

• balance across a day?
• balance across a week?
• balance across a month?

In the end I really just wanted for my family to be happy and satisfied and that I was also happy and satisfied too. I realised that this may sometimes means I leave my family for a week to attend a blogging conference on the other side of the world and other times that I will go offline for weeks at a time to have my family as the sole focus.

For the last couple of months of 2011, I tilted towards key activities at different points in time. And by not hooking myself into the goal of balance, I could do it without the over thinking and the fretting. It wasn’t neat, tidy and even but we were all happy and were able to achieve individual and family goals in this time.

There is much I can do to plan and utilise my time better, so when titled, the other areas of my life are not deprived of my attention. Over the next few months I will be sharing strategies for this.

But for now on the dilemma of balance, I would recommend considering if this is something that you want to set yourself as a goal?

Over to you – I would love to hear what you think!

Current Sponsors:

• Bright Star Kids' Name Labels - Super Cute & Durable Name Labels
• Byk KIds Bikes - The first ergonomically designed Kids Bikes

The Dilemma Of Balance is a post from: Planning With Kids

Like many, I would like to update my wardrobe more often than my budget would allow. I do check out op shops to help add some extra flair to the wardrobe, but more recently I have been enjoying attending the Clothing Exchange at Federation Square in Melbourne.

The Clothing Exchange was developed by Kate Pears for her Masters of Fashion (by thesis) in 2004 at RMIT University:

The Clothing Exchange is a professional swapping service that promotes the simple notion of swapping instead of shopping for a better wardrobe and better world. The Clothing Exchange mediates the exchange of clothing donated by patrons in the form of a clothes swapping event.

There are now Clothing Exchange events in:

• Melbourne
• Sydney
• Canberra
• Brisbane

How the Clothing Exchange Works

You take along garments that are in very good condition, but that you no longer want. I took 4 items along the last time I went.

There is always a chance that you won’t find as many items as you like. I only found 3 that I really liked, but I took one more garment that I sort of liked as well. I have now stored that item to take and swap at the next Clothing Exchange I attend.

Quality Control at the Clothing Exchange

The team do carefully inspect all the clothes you take to swap. They pride themselves on keeping the quality of the items to exchange high.

For every item that passes quality control you receive a button – they are the currency for the evening. To take an item of clothing home with you, you need to exchange it for a button. Buttons are only valid for the night of the exchange.

Then it is the fun part – trying on clothes and finding something you love to take home. My favourite swap from last time were a pair of Superfine Jeans. They are not what I would ordinarily have bought, but every time I wear them people ask me about them. It is nice to have a fun story behind how I own them!

Have you participated in a Clothing Exchange before?

Current Sponsors:

• Bright Star Kids' Name Labels - Super Cute & Durable Name Labels
• Byk KIds Bikes - The first ergonomically designed Kids Bikes

Clothing Exchange is a post from: Planning With Kids