mutteringhousewife

I was asked again last night. “How do you do it?” Three kids who, with a whoop and a holler, have joined everything their expensive schools have to offer, two choirs for me, two jobs plus soccer for my husband, committees galore for both of us. It’s very simple, really. There’s this thing, you may have heard of it. It’s called a calendar.

Of course, a paper calendar has no chance with a schedule like ours. I use Microsoft Outlook, and we put EVERYTHING in it. Every kids activity (use the recurrence function), every birthday party, every P&F meeting, every doctor’s appointment. My husband even puts reminders in it for cleaning the pool or calling people. His brain is full of cricket statistics, he has no room for minutiae. Then we synchronise every day with both my phone and my husband’s. Even the Moose is starting to occasionally load the family calendar onto his laptop. Early in our marriage my husband proposed this system and he used our mutual sanctimoniousness to get our whole lives onto it. “Well, you couldn’t possibly be going to the pub after soccer, it isn’t in the calendar”, is rarely heard any more. Our relationship has been a long struggle for moral superiority. I think I pinched that from Marge Simpson.

Here’s what the evenings for this week look like:

The rule is that if there’s space in the calendar, you can go ahead with the proposed activity. Saves all that marital bickering about who told whom what and when. Synchronising has occasionally been a problem. We do it manually with a cable to the computer at the moment. I tried synchronising it with Google Calendar and it crashed the entire computer. I also tried iCloud but ended up with duplicates and even triplicates, so we’re waiting for either technology to catch up with us, or for us to go completely Apple. It may happen. Stranger things have.

No, I don’t think we’re trying to fit too much in. All of the kids activities have been volunteered for, in some cases begged for. They must be completing their homework with ease and getting sufficient sleep if they want to cram something else in. And what would I be doing with more time at home? Cleaning? Watching TV? Tchah. When we do all see each other, we have much to talk about. Much.

So what I want to know is, how do those of you who don’t use this system do it? How do you ever remember to get anywhere?