She never, ever leaves home without the book that her family jokingly refers to as “The Bible According to Gibbons.” The daytimer is not only expertly filled out (starting in July for January), it’s coded, too. Each of her four children, between the ages of nine and 21, have an assigned colour.

At home, those colours are lined up in a pocket next to the whiteboard/corkboard hanging on the fridge. This is organization central.

“I’ve trained the family to check the calendar before saying yes to anything,” she says, “even if it’s a last minute call.”

Managing schedules in a family requires a certain skill set beyond simply filling in a calendar. It takes time, planning and a certain amount of responsibility from everyone involved. Gibbons says it also takes a certain amount of authority.

“If it’s not in the book, it doesn’t happen,” she says. “And no one but me writes on the calendar. I duplicate it in my daytimer because at some point, I will get a call asking, “Where am I supposed to be?””
Gibbons comes from a long line of highly organized people and that’s probably a good thing. Her children are involved in dance, hockey, soccer and baseball several times a week and she works full-time. In her “spare” time, Gibbons has also managed her children’s sports teams and continues to volunteer at her children’s school as a Kiss ‘N Ride coordinator and member of the School Community Council.

To keep the wheel greased and turning, Gibbons sends her husband a reminder e-mail every Monday morning which details what’s going during the week and who he has to pick up when and where. She also leaves colour-coded post-it notes beside the light switch to remind everyone in the morning of what’s going on and if they need to remember to anything with them. Often the kids’ activities overlap, so this type of planning allows everyone to make plans for the week, based on the family schedule.
When there are conflicting events – her son recently had an away hockey tournament and her daughter needed to be at a competitive dance competition – they held a family meeting to discuss what to do.

“We talked about this was my daughter’s first year in competitive dance and that this was her turn,” she says. “So it was a family decision.”

When it’s all too much, Gibbons turns to her daytimer for comfort. She keeps a separate journal where she can write when she needs to decompress. She also turns to friends. She and another mom share the dance driving and, when necessary, her youngest son’s hockey coach or another parent takes him to practice and she picks him up after.

“You have to have people you can rely on,” she says. “I have a number of people I can call at a moment’s notice.”
Important in all of this planning is also taking time for you, according to Kim Etherington, a Durham-based life coach and counsellor.

She says mothers, in particular, do a poor job of pencilling in time for their activities and that often leads to burn out and resentment.

“There’s often an imbalance,” she says. “Parents are equally important.”

Etherington says it’s essential to hand over some of the responsibility to make that time. As soon as your children are old enough to e-mail, they’re also old enough to find their own sports schedules. If an activity, such as rep soccer or hockey, is chewing up a lot of your family’s time, that child should be required to do more around the house.

“My children have been doing their own laundry since they were 11,” she says. “It’s their clothes they want clean. It might seem easier to do it yourself in the short term, especially the first time they overflow the washing machine, but in the long run that’s not true.”

She also highly recommends a family meeting, either weekly or once a month. It’s a time to plan ahead and see what’s working and what’s not.

“If something’s not getting accomplished, you can brainstorm for solutions,” she says.

Etherington says it’s also important to be realistic about what the family can manage. If you live in Bowmanville and both parents work in Toronto, she says you have to relieve yourself of any guilt and simply say “We can’t do it.” If, however, you have the support of extended family or neighbours, go for it. The important thing is to do only what you can manage.