Realism and Teamwork
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Homemaking on Monday, November 16, 2009 10:00 AM
This weekend, my husband and I took care of two major tasks. Bryan tackled the yard, raking and bagging leaves and cleaning gutters. I rotated the children’s clothes, storing the outgrown ones and getting their fall wardrobes ready.
These two things took the entire weekend, and we were proud that we managed to get them both done!
We used to make ambitious lists of the things we hoped to accomplish on a free weekend, and each time we’d face Monday defeated, having checked off only a third of the things on our list. It was bad for morale.
Gradually we figured out that the problem wasn’t that we had too little time. Of course we had too little time! There is never enough time to do all the things that you’d ideally like to do. Our problem was that our expectation of what we could accomplish in the forty-eight hours of the weekend (during which we also had to take care of ourselves and our children, get the family to Mass, and hopefully rest on Sunday) had no connection to reality.
So we made a conscious decision to cut back on weekend ambition. We keep our list to two biggish tasks or several smaller ones. We also plan in advance that for each task, one of us will take the lead on the task and the other one will be in charge of the kids. Sometimes if the kids cooperate, the childcare person can help with the job. But knowing that he won’t be tapped for kid duty cuts way back on frustration for the person in charge of the task, and it makes the job get done faster, too.
I’m curious about the way other households handle the Big Weekend Task situation. Please share how your family does it!
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