Friday, January 18, 2019

A New Year a new calendar

A warm welcome this morning to you.  I have been finishing setting up my new calendar for the year.  Each year I try to find a calendar with larger squares because I like to write in my supper meal plan on it.  This helps me to plan for the week, and to prepare things earlier if Mr P will be gone that evening.

The past few years my favorite calendar is Heart to Home from Current Catalog.  While shipping is a bit much for a calendar, it is worth it for the spaces I need each day. Makes planning for family and household activities much easier. Though this year there was a bit of mix up with them, but they expressed mailed the correct calendar, hence the reason I am just finishing setting it up.  God's timing not mine.

So here is my new calendar that stays on the front of my refrigerator.


I do the same for my planner.  While I call it a planner, it's more of a glorified calendar and to do list for each day.  I have a Home Management Binder that has seasonal to-do's and Church related traditions we celebrate.

Here is a close up of the squares. I write in the meals for 2 weeks and rotate them so I only pick 14 meals for each season.  These periodically change to a new recipe or depending on what we tried and I hear "hmmmm"  after a new recipe, I mark a note on the calendar and don't make that again :-) 

So my calendar set up has been this way since my early years of marriage, back when the girls were very little and had activities.  Anything more than my appts after I got married, and I needed a new system. So this is mine.

I always get out colored markers, because we all have a little kid in us that LOVES markers, and I start with January. I draw a line down the left and right side, separating Sunday and Saturday from the week. The colors usually have something to do with the monthly season or theme:

January = blue for cold and snow
February= red for Valentine's
March = green for St Patrick's day
April = a different blue then Jan, for April showers bring....
May= pink! for May flowers  :-)  I know goofy, but fun.
please tell me you have heard of "April showers, bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring....Pilgrims!" I learned it when I was very young.
June= green for grass and harvest growth
July= one side usually is red and the other blue, or I do dots down both sides of red & blue
August= a dark yellow (so you can see it) for a sunny hot month
September= red for an apple for the teacher ( I was a substitute teacher for elementary school for many years while we were stationed in Okinawa)
October = orange for PUMPKINS!!!
November= brown for the amazing fall leaves that we see
December = red and green for Christmas!

Then I do the same for the little calendar I take with me.  There is one other quirky tradition I have, I learned it from my Grandma. She had one of those little 5 year diaries and she would write in a few events of the day in it, but she ALWAYS wrote in the morning temperature. (I have recently learned she did this because her and grandpa were farmers and needed to know the daily temp.)

So way back in high school I started writing in the daily temperature in the left corner of my calendar. I do it to track the weather and see how we are slowly going into winter, then see how we are slowly warming up to Spring.  This is also a neat way for me to see 'what was it like last year', yep I keep a few years worth of calendars tucked away just for that and a sort of diary of when appts were last year.

No one in my family has ever noticed the temperature thing, they just know I always look to see what it is when I get up.  If I get up late, I still write what it was but I ask Mr P since he is always up long before the sun.

That's it!  That is my  fun way to start my year.  Then there are the colors for the dates: like blue for church related feasts and celebrations, pink for me for any appts etc, Mr P is green and any family events are pencil. They change too much.  Anniversaries & Bdays are in red - so I don't forget :-)

May God bless you this year.  Do you have any traditions for January you do that you would like to share?

~Dee

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