A hardcore kids’ calendar

Here’s a sample of a little parenting thing I’ve been doing for a year or so now:

Our family life is complicated — Andrew and have have taken three business trips between us this year and have three to go — and we’re pretty heavily calendared. V doesn’t read yet and his sense of time is not awfully sophisticated. Once he is told the weekday (sometimes he knows what it is already) he can tell what regular event is on, but presently the past is “yesterday”, “a few days ago” and “when I was a little boy”, that last being anywhere from a week to two years in the past. And in any event I’m not sure the most literate of four year olds would be quite ready for the five Google calendars I use to manage our lives. (One for each individual, one for the family. Plus Tripit calendars but let’s ignore that for now.)

So whenever a particularly complicated sequence of events is coming up, I make him a pictorial calendar. In this one, which is for the next two and a half weeks, you can see daycare on most weekdays, swimming lessons on Fridays, our plane trip this weekend (for a wedding), and the visit to his paternal grandparents next weekend (for my parents, who farm beef, I use a silhouette of a steer). And, new to this calendar, SCHOOL: he’s going to a Term 4 orientation program starting in a few weeks and going into December.

Even with this I haven’t quite brought myself to do the following week, when Andrew leaves for Tokyo on the Tuesday, I leave for Ballarat with A on the Friday, V stays with Julia and Barry on the Friday night (for Halloween), Andrew returns on the Saturday morning and picks him up and then I return on the Monday evening after Andrew is launched into one of his busiest work weeks of the year. I think that week will get its own special calendar. In blood, possibly.