Tag: time management

The newborn-moon period is over. It’s time to work on a new system that caters for all. Unfortunately, my husband’s paternity leave has ended, and he is back to work. Our eldest child, B, was back in kindergarten. At least he was at the start of the week. However, on Wednesday afternoon he started to feel under the weather. It became clear that he was ill when his temperature 🤒 went up. We gave him Calpol twice that day and he slept through the night. The next two days, he spent at home resting. And of course by the time weekend came around, he was getting better 🌟

Then Saturday afternoon, our daughter woke up crying with high fever just before midnight. Quick Calpol, many hugs and we tucked her back into her cot. Here comes Sunday and all three kids are poorly. The smallest one is only 17 days old, but he also got the cough and runny nose. Days like these are truly appreciate the fact that we live in a multi-generational household. I always think about all the single parents out there with the deepest respect. If it’s you, I salute you!

System Building

This week I wanted to concentrate on building a flexible system to guide me throughout the day. I am trying to balance many things around the kids schedule without going crazy. I would like to keep some space in our days for my wellbeing, so I can recharge my batteries and be a better person. There are only x amount of hours within the day, so I have thought hard how to balance everything. Can certain tasks be combined and carried out simultaneously? In theory, the answer is yes! As long as it involves everyone, why not, right? Well… we shall see in the coming weeks.

I would like to start the day with a morning walk, just like I did while I was pregnant with my daughter. Now that the days are getting longer, I can soon start going out before the kids wake up. This walk is all about me and some music or podcast I choose to start the day with.

After breakfast ideally I would head outside with our daughter for a little bike ride, or just messing around at the local playground. She is happy to stay in the cold outdoors, for about 30-40 minutes. Then we go inside, where I go through a zone per day to eliminate things I no longer use or need. Meanwhile, I wait for our daughter to give me some signs when she is ready for her nap. Mostly, she is down by 11 am but it all depends on what time she wakes up in the morning. Once she is asleep I can focus on my coding journey. I am currently learning some JavaScript for the millionth time 😦 .

This is my second golden hour: My daughter is usually asleep and my son is not yet back from kindergarten. By eliminating the lunch prep task, I can free up this sacred time for my benefit.

After lunch time while my son has quiet time, I can carry on coding. Once my daughter is up from her nap time, and she filled up her tummy, we can head outside. Currently it is hard to handle the two eldest outside alone. One would like to play football, frisbee, or tennis. While our daughter just want to go, go, and go. If she decides to do something, nobody and nothing can stop her. I hope it will change soon, as it would be fun to show her things, and do some activities together with his brother.

In general, it would be great to spend most of the afternoon outside, however this time is purely led by our children. I listen to their needs, while I try to extend the time we are outside. I plan to do some gardening while they are playing, but not sure how it will work out. Previously I separated gardening from outdoor time, but I hope this is something we manage to do side by side and the kids will eventually get inspired by nature and growing things.

In the evening, I plan to prep dinner as well as lunch for the next day. With a little forward thinking, one hour should be enough to prep for both mealtimes. After dinner bath and bedtime. Once the kiddies are in bed, I spend some time on the blog, while hubby plays a bit on our son’s Nintendo Switch 🙂 We both like to watch some limited series on Netflix to unwind at the end of the day.

1000 hours outside

My personal goal is to increase my daily step count to 20K. I hope to shed some weight without any special workouts. Walking perfectly fits with my commitment to the 1000 hours outside challenge this year and sneakily I hope to inspire my kids to be outdoorsy ‘like their Mom’ or even more.

Two weeks after the operation my step count was finally over 15K for the first time since our baby boy was born. What an achievement. I was so nervous about third time recovery. I have never in my wildest dreams imagined that I will be so active a couple of weeks after re-re-section.

Overall, we logged 9 hours for the second time this year. As you can see on the photos, snow covered the fields at the beginning of the week. Then by Saturday we were enjoying the warmth of the sunshine on our skin. I am looking forward to next week. It is sports holiday, which means there is no kindergarten and more time to spend in the nature.

Language skills

Nearly a year ago, we moved from the UK to the German-speaking part of Switzerland 🇨🇭. It is beautiful here and we love the area. However, we don’t speak German 🇩🇪 YET.

Our eldest just started kindergarten in August last year. He has two mini German lessons a week with the school’s English teacher. It is more like a friendly chat/game than a formal lesson.

I want to help him as much as possible, but unfortunately, I don’t know how to speak German. To ensure that I don’t teach him anything incorrectly, I am thinking to focus on passive learning. Just playing with words should be fun. He is asking more and more questions about how to write specific words and how to read certain signs / phrases.

This month’s payday gift was a letter game. Letters are displayed on tiny wooden dice and there are multiple dice of the same letter. In German language every noun has a gender, similar to Italian. So I am thinking of coming up with a vocabulary game that compares nouns, so he can connect the words he already knows in one language or another. I am thinking to use day to day topics of activities he does during the day.

In our family we speak many different languages. Sometimes one of us will struggle to remember a word in that particular language we use at that moment. Then we would ask the other person to help by saying it in another language (whatever form it is remembered). And this whole dilemma ends up with a discussion of this of word in all the languages we speak and any other way we know but not necessarily speak.

I will let you know how it goes after a couple of times weeks.