It takes a village, and a notebook

You know how they say that kids don't come with instruction manuals?  Well, for one short week, I did my best to create an instruction manual to go with my kids. 

In preparation for leaving our home and children for a week, I put together a 3-ring binder of instructions.  I filled it with one typed page for each day.  It included a schedule of events, dinner menu, and other little reminders for each day.  I also included a page of general guidelines, and a list of people and phone numbers which were crucial to the week.  I tried to make sure that my mom/Doug's brother&sis-in-law/my sister (thank you, family!) could run things as smoothly as possible without having to do too many extra things besides just being here.  For example, the schedule did not include cleaning the bathrooms, grocery shopping, paying bills, preparing a Singing Time for Primary, reconciling bank accounts, Valentine's Day preparations, etc., etc.  And I arranged for other people (my "village") to do as much of the running-kids-here-and-there as possible.

After our return home, the binder sat on the counter for a couple more days before Doug convinced me that it could now be tossed out.  It's silly, but I was hesitant to do it.  For one thing, it took a lot of effort to put that all together, and I was kind of proud of it!  And secondly, I was kind of wishing I would open it up and it would magically have typed pages for me, as I jump back into reality.  Wouldn't that be nice?  Actually, I think some company called Franklin tried to promote such planning several years ago.  But the truth is, thankfully, I'm still young enough, and in my groove, so that I can store all that info handily in my brain.  It just looks so much more impressive on paper!