Often when we leave for awhile, I’ll make a weekly or monthly calendar noting the things that might be different. I’ll give one to Thida, noting the extra work she’s filling in for us.
And for The Reinforcers, I give them new calendars, what they call timetables, quite often. This is in part because they have special events each month where they’ve been hired, so their work days or hours are often changing. They also have changing schedules with school, so we might work more or different times of day when they are on holiday. And we simply change their schedules pretty often; and since they are 15 and 18, I try to make sure I’ve communicated when they are to come in hopes of them showing up on time.
Well, it’s become a bit of a joke, as I hand them another piece of paper week after week or month after month. They laugh because I explain it yet again. (To be fair, they forgot again this Wednesday, on their normal day of work every week, to come until I reminded them!) Each time Stephen makes a joke about them throwing it away, or perhaps about the thirty timetables tacked to their wall.
This week, Stephen and I have yet again re-worked our own schedules, as we try to work around each other’s schedules and make sure one of us has Oak, we can both get to our Burmese lessons, we both have some down time in the week, and someone is free to get people to the hospital. And after our plans were made, he requested a chart of “Who has Oak?” for different chunks of time that we are separate. So I made a weekly layout of when he is primarily working and when I am primarily working; and then when our family times are.
The Reinforcers arrived to work last night and saw it posted on the wall, to which they asked, “Stephen, is that your, uh…timetable?”
Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.
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