The colour of our week

Hello, Google Calendar, I love you.

Everyone's schedules can be done up independently and then superimposed, or made invisible, according to one's preference at any given moment. Here is the full picture of a typical week, a week that doesn't involve a trip to Calgary or a workshop in Nelson or a field trip or an all-day board meeting or an Aikido seminar.

Don't panic. The big swaths of purple stuff is just Erin at school. I'm not involved there at all. The green blocks are family activities that involve me and the kids -- and some of those, like the later-evening gym blocks, are discretionary. Red stuff is my work, whether at the clinic or Suzuki music teaching. Once we remove the red that only affects me, and Erin's school, we end up with something that looks much better:

Isn't that nice? Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays are terrific. Plenty of down-time.

The only problem is that now that I've got this over-scheduling problem licked, I seem to finally have on my hands a couple of kids who enjoy busy days with other people. Sophie and Fiona would like a little more in the way of activities. On my Google Calendar Sophie is yellow and Fiona is turquoise, plus they're also involved in the green (family) blocks and the brown (driving) where relevant. Honestly, they'd love two mornings a week of art class, aikido, music classes or something -- heck maybe even of school, if an appropriate program could be found. But none of these things are possible where we live. I suspect this is just a temporary situation, though, due to the fact that some regular activities are still gearing up. Once orchestra, aikido and Calgary trips begin in October, and the inevitable weekend workshops, concerts and recitals begin getting slotted in, I think they'll be happy.

I figure a good balance has been struck if life sometimes feels a little over-busy and sometimes a little under-busy. We're just going through a little phase of a couple of us feeling under-busy. The pendulum will swing the other way, I don't doubt it. But I think it would be fair to say that the pendulum isn't swinging widely these days, just a little to one side or other. We've got it pretty close to right for us, I think.