Making Your Home A Haven: Planning and Errands

As I try to catch up with the Make Your Home A Haven series at The Homespun Heart, I will talk a little bit about planning and errands.

Planning:
I am a planner at heart. From the time I was in high school, I loved to plan meetings, dances, events, etc. This has served me well as a mother! I am always thinking ahead to the next day, week, and year. I think about and start to plan birthdays, holidays, parties, and projects often months in advance. Of course, all of my day to day work as a mom needs a lot of planning as well.

For years, I have used a desk top planner. I would fall apart without my calender/planner! It is important for me to hand write things on my schedule rather than type them into a computer . . . dates and events seem to stick better in my brain when I have written them down. In my planner you will find activities, appointments, to do lists, grocery and shopping lists, menu plans, homework assignments, birthdays, holidays, milestones, phone numbers, ideas . . . pretty much EVERYTHING we do as a family. The key to my success of my planner is that I look at it SEVERAL times a day and it sits in a prominent place in my home. I keep my planner on my hutch in my dining room. This area has become my "Command Station." I keep my calender, a magnetic message board, a project basket filled with the books and activities we are working on, a notepad, and pens and pencils:

This year, I selected a hot pink Mom Agenda. While this is not my favorite planner I have ever purchased, it is very pretty! The best planners I have used in the past are week at a glance planners with large spaces to record activities and appointments with additional space for notes, lists and menus.

I always keep my planners in a special place when I am done with them for the year. They have become my diary and journal. Every so often I flip through them and look at what we were doing at that time. From the day I met my husband, to the day we found out we were pregnant, to the day one of our babies first said mama, I have a record of all our memories!

Errands:
Running errands has been increasingly difficult with every child we have added to our growing family. I often wish every store had a drive-thru! I am sure at one time or another every mother with little ones has cringed at the thought of strapping her babies into a car seat and dragging them through the grocery store, the post office, the bank, Target, Wal Mart . . . (fill in the blank here with all the places it is hard to take your little kids!) After baby #3, I finally smartened up and decided to hire a babysitter once a week. She watches my 2 younger girls while I volunteer at the school for an hour and then run almost all of my errands.

The key to running my errands is good planning. I always keep four separate running lists: one for the grocery store, one for Costco, one for Trader Joe's/Whole Foods, and one for Target or Wal Mart. I try to combine my errands as best I can. I often jot down a "road map" of where I need to go and what I need to do so I can save on time and gas!

How do you plan your days and run your errands?

Don't forget to visit The Homespun Heart for more ideas on how to make your home a haven!