24 Hours in a Day

We never have enough time. You can't get more--there are only 24 hours in a day and that's it. The best you can hope to do is spend your time wisely. When I was in school we even got graded on our report cards for "Uses Time Wisely." Which I think meant "do what the teacher tells you when she tells you to do it." From my experiences as a teacher I can tell you it also means, "don't spend 15 minutes playing with your pencil before you write your name on your paper" and "don't get up to get kleenexes every 5 minutes."

A great deal of our time as a family is taken up by 3 major things: work, church, and school (not necessarily in that order). As parents, we head off to work first thing in the morning. As a family, and with my husband being a part-time youth minister, we spend a lot of time at church or working on church stuff. As a student, my daughter spends 7 1/2 hours a day at school and another 30 minutes to an hour on homework each evening. And this is only first grade, folks. Public school was worse. I've dreaded thinking about what middle school would hold in the homework department!

Coming home is going to add SO much time to our days! Subtract the 4 hours I spend on work each morning and add them to our home. Homeschooling...subtract 8 hours a day and add that to family life. Oh I know those hours could quickly get eaten by other things. I'm going to be careful to guard them! The things that have been lacking at home will be covered. The time with my daughter will be a treasure. And maybe, when we see a snail on the door like we did this morning, we will have time to stop and really look at it.