Schedule-one week in

We've been following our schedule for a week, now.
There have been benefits and a couple of major challenges.
The real improvement has been early in the morning. I realised, when writing the schedule, that I really did need to get up half an hour earlier (shouldn't be writing this now!). This has paid off, with other tweaking, for the morning so that we have managed to have breakfast and family worship, in one sitting, and have the older children out on time. Dh has been able to go for a walk and, in a change, to the schedule, take our 10 year old out for a bike ride, at the same time. They have come back in time to start work and home education respectively. All sounds too good to be true! Well, that part has been fine, of course, it could all fall apart tomorrow-I'm a pessimist.

The challenges, however, are around hospital appointments and our dear little toddler.

We are a three generation family. This involves a fair number of appointments at the hospital. Despite my best efforts to have all these in holiday time, there have been three in the last week. There is at least another one due next week and these may continue, at the rate of one or two a week, for weeks to months. The appointments have been at different times of day although it is possible that, in future, most might be at the same sort of time. I think that this will make things easier as it will be possible to arrange learning and also activities for the little ones, hopefully outside of the waiting room.

The schedule does involve a column for our toddler who is a dear exuberant little fellow. It doesn't really allow for all his escapades. Yesterday, he drank water from the bird bath, ate chilli powder and changed the washing machine programme before 10am. Yes, he was supervised-I was hanging washing in the garden and didn't quite get to the bird bath, which is too high for him to fall into, in time. Yes, I was in the kitchen and yes, we are working on training and yes, we probably need to work harder on training! We do have "preschool" time for him and his 3 year old sister. It works really well for our daughter-we made a "toddler friendly" recipe, from the Tesco magazine today. Dd enjoyed counting, talking, sprinkling ingredients and generally helping but Mr Exuberance wasn't really interested-standing on a chair trying to put salt in the teapot was better. Be warned, if I offer you tea.

Realistically, I suspect that the activities I offer are geared at his sister and are too hard for him. I have also scheduled a playtime for him with his sister which isn't really working. He probably needs more Mummy time. Any other ideas will be gratefully received.

Scheduling school work has worked well, as I always knew it would. I haven't altered what worked for us, last year, very much.

Overall, the schedule has helped us achieve more-it is a profitable servant. We have deviated from it parts of most days and it probably needs to be revised. I received an e-mail, yesterday from the people at Titus 2 with this message around staying the course with scheduling which certainly came at an opportune time for me.