My mother was actually able to take home economics as a course in high school. By the time I got to high school it had been renamed “personal finances and family life” and now it doesn’t exist in my daughter’s high school at all. They have a personal finances course and several business courses, but household management did NOT seem to be one of the high priorities.

A very good friend and I recently got into an almost argument over feminism. She views herself as a feminist and applauds the achievements of the women’s movement over the past thirty or forty years. I look at the feminists as rather a destructive force, not in touch with most women’s lives and I feel rather betrayed by a movement that claims to speak for all women yet really only speaks for liberal and career women. Case and point .. home-economics is dead in high schools (and don’t even think about let alone talk about something as archaic as a club like Future Homemakers of America.) And no I don’t think personal finance is a great substitute, while banking and money management are important there is a good deal more to household management then just that.

Having been in business I can safely say that a family is (from a financial and management point of view) a business. The Domestic Church, the family, in addition to being viewed as an Abbey in the spiritual sense also has many parallels to an Abbey in the business sense.

If you run your home financial matters as if you were running a business you will be far more successful in staying out of debt, living within your means and having the ability to deal with those expected and unexpected expenses that every family faces.

The three things that have helped our family the most in finances are: Budgeting, Menu Planning and Debt Cascading (snowball debt reduction). Each of these I will address in the future more completely

Budgeting is critical. It is boring, it is tedious… most people don’t do it. But only an idiot would run a business without a budget, and they wouldn’t be in business long. Budgeting isn’t horrible. If you don’t budget at all just spend the next two months tracking your spending. Write down everything that is spent by everyone in the family. This has the two part effect of figuring out where your money goes and curbing spending. For some strange reason most people are less likely to spend on small purchases if they are tracking them. A dollar a day on soda seems too small too count, but twenty dollars a month is 240 dollars a year. It adds up. Once you know exactly where your money is going it is much easier to make a realistic budget.

Menu Planning. Most of our expenses are fixed or only slightly variable. Of the variable expenses food is the largest expense. If we eat out, even at McDonald’s it sets us back the better part of twenty dollars. By deciding ahead what we will eat each day I can buy smarter, it takes the headache out of deciding what will be for dinner and we can have enough so that the oldest daughter and my husband can both have “take-with” lunches instead of “take-out”.

Cascading debt reduction is probably the most powerful little tool I have ever used to help our finances. After our fourth child was born we had a pile of debt. Medical bills were just pouring in. I was able to call and get payment schedules set up with every one of them. Then I used a Cascading debt plan to get out from the debt. I ordered the debts from smallest to largest (none of them had interest), put in a modest extra payment amount on the first, paid it off then took the amount I had been paying to debt 1 added it to the payment for debt two and paid debt two off in no time, then the entire amount goes to debt three.

These are just three little ideas to start. The big idea here: Run your home finances like a business and you are more likely to stay in the black.

This is the one area I struggle with the most.  I am not naturally ordered or neat.  It is an absolute monumental task for me to keep the house in any near state of order.  But it is also something that I continue to work on. 

I find that order is helpful to keeping things calm and pleasant. 

Here are a few random ideas.  This is more a stub to come back and work on more later, but I really want to get these out here now.

1. There are many great programs out there, but don’t feel like a failure if a particular program (cough cough Flylady cough) doesn’t work for you.  Try something else.

2.  Lists are very helpful to me they might be for you.  Check out The Grand Plan

3. Watch out for over accumulation.  It is much more difficult to keep up with the laundry, dishes, toys and books if you have too many of them to start with.  Pare down the amount of what you own and you cut your work load.

4.  Enlist the army.  Many hands make light work — big families make lots of messes, but there are more people to help keep it up.  Everyone who can walk can do something.  (I am serious there.. when I am picking up I try to have even the baby do a little bit.)

5. Make a plan and work the plan.  Only you can really decide what needs to be done when, but there are tools to help. http://sciral.com/ has a nice little tool to help schedule things.  ( I will blog more on that later)

6 Go for simplicity in decorating.   Form should always follow function.  Yes, the stainless steal fridge looks great in the show room, but is it going to show every single fingerprint?

7.  Use a timer if you dread cleaning or get distracted easily.

 This past Lent I read “The Story of a Soul”one thing that drew my attention was the home life of the young St. Therese of Lisieux. Her family lived and breathed the Catholic faith. It wasn’t something kept for Sunday, tucked into the closet like best shoes or a frilly dress, beautiful, loved and safe but not for everyday wear. It was the first and only option. So many times families let so many competing voices into their homes that the faith, Christ’s quiet voice, is all but drowned out. Over scheduled activities, must have sports, classes and play-dates, the incessant din of the television and the glow of the computer monitor all vie for our attention, and worse our children’s attention, leaving little time for prayer, family fun time, or even a meal together.

The Catechism calls the homes of the faithful “the Domestic Church” and “ islands of Christian life in an unbelieving world”. We are that. A muddy, boggy little island at times, but an island. I will confess that I have an ideal in mind. A home where life rotates around the faith and the education of all members of the family. A home that is orderly in environment and schedule, quiet and peaceful, yet plenty of laughter and fun. Something like an abbey meets a retreat house meets a vibrant school. The past week it has felt more like an asylum meets a sick house meets prison laundry. And thus runs life. We take a couple hard won steps forward and slide back another one or more.

I suppose I take great comfort in the fact that I am working toward an eternal goal. I guess in ways it takes the pressure off doing everything at once. I am a convert to the Catholic faith and was not raised in a religious home myself. So I have a lot to learn and a long ways to go. One thing I have discovered repetitively is that it is ok if not everyone is totally on board with the program to start with. While I think it would be rather more difficult to create a change in the atmosphere of a home with one or more members being actively hostile to the change I don’t think it impossible. Especially not if the changes are gentle, well thought out and conducive to greater peace and happiness.

The Catholic family is a religious community. The term Abby I think particularly is suited to the Catholic household. In a linguistic borrowing back, Abby came from Abba, a community lead by a spiritual father or mother, the term is very fitting. The Catholic family is led by a father and mother who have been granted by God by natural and divine law the leadership role over their children. The children are learning and growing within a community, the community of the family.

What makes Catholic homemaking different isn’t some magic checklist or some decorating style. It isn’t saying a rosary every afternoon or attending Adoration twice a week. It is living as the Domestic church, the island in the river of the world that provides a higher ground for us to grow in faith and wisdom together. It is being a religious community.

Most the women that I deal with on a day-to-day basis are Catholic-homeschooling-mothers-to-big families (four or more children). This right away sets us apart from most families in the US. It really seems we have more in common in those three elements than we have different in all the rest of our lives, but there are some wide differences. These differences usually are how strict a family is, to borrow a Jewish concept how “frum” a family is, and how “earth friendly” or “crunchy” a family is.

First and foremost we are Catholic. For most of us it shows. Being open to life, having larger families, the crucifixes on the wall. It just shows. There is a slightly different rhythm to Catholic life. We are lighting candles for Advent while our neighbors are hanging ornaments for Christmas and our tree is still up a week into January while theirs came down by December 27. Here in Portland, Oregon we even missed the free “Christmas tree recycling” window with the local trash and Boy Scout troops this year.

Occupation: homemaker.

Well that is what the census sees. I am also many other things, but homemaker covers a good deal of what I am. What is “homemaking”? How does “Catholic homemaking” differ from just run of the mill homemaking and how does it differ from non-Catholic yet Christian homemaking? I think homemaking is far more than just cleaning the house and tending the children. Homemaking is a personal expression of values, lifestyle and love.

I have vacillated for a long while on which of two terms I like better: Homemaker or Household Manager. I kind of lean toward Household Manager. I manage the household in ways more than I make it, but homemaking seems to be the word that most people associate with the list of tasks that fall into the category. This week I am beginning a series of entries on homemaking, specifically “Catholic Homemaking” in which I hope to address some of these issues, mostly for myself and my own amusement, but perhaps of some small use to someone else out there.

Over the next two weeks I intend to cover the following topics:

The Domestic Church — What makes Catholic homemaking Catholic

Keeping the Home — The basic elements to homemaking

Home Economics – Finances and menu planning

Education – Educating ourselves and our children

Scheduling – The rhythms of the day, week, month and year.

A Labor of Love – Mostly my personal musings on love, life and watch makes homemaking worthwhile.

Before I start I want to preemptively address two issues:

First: I am going to purposefully side step the “Work-outside-the-home” vrs the “Stay-at-home” mom debate. I have been there, both sides, done it, made my choice. I firmly believe that families and children do better and most women do better when the mother is the primary caretaker and educator of her children. I know that is not an option for some women either due to finances or temperament, but I am not going into it here. I don’t apologize for my stand, if it is different than your experience that is fine, I hope that some of what I say is still useful to you. Please do not get hung up on the fact that I don’t specifically address your personal situation.

Second: As the title of this blog implies, I believe that simplicity is extremely important. The Christian life demands a purity of purpose. We are made to love and serve God, things that draw us closer to God hold a higher value than those things which distract. Busy schedules, material possessions, a glut of media (especially television) draw away from God and leave us less time to serve him and love one another. Again, I don’t apologize for my stand, if it is different than your experience that is fine, hopefully some of what I say will be of use to you. If not there are many sites that will have more specific information for you.