Once the morning routine is over, I either plan for us to be “At Home” or “Out.” Those are pretty much the only parameters I have on our mornings until lunchtime comes at 11:30. So instead of scheduling playtimes, cleaning time, and outings by the clock, I’ve started looking at our days as having some loosely defined open-ended space. And sometimes they want to play when I had mentally scheduled myself to clean. One of the hardest things about motherhood for me is my craving to get things done. I love checklists, to-do apps, and sticker charts.īut my kids don’t always want to stop their play to do the next item on my list. Maybe you want to add snacktime in as an anchor point, too.įind the anchor points that work for you, and build your rhythm around them. Maybe your children have preschool only twice a week, but they eat lunch at the same time every day. Maybe you eat breakfast at different times every morning, but you are for sure at the gym for a class by 10. They might be different at your house, and that is okay! Bedtime routine (prayer, story, song, and tuck-in).Morning routine (getting ready for the day & eating breakfast, school drop-off for the oldest).So to keep your rhythm within boundaries that you can control, start by setting what Kara Fleck calls “ anchor points.”Īn anchor point is a dependable point in each day that you choose to keep at a consistent time. While it is nice to be flexible, building your entire day around the ebbs and flows of a child’s unpredictable mood can also be really discouraging. Which allows you to undergo the shoe-battle (or the vegetables-for-lunch battle or whatever else you need to take on) without feeling like you’re falling behind. It has an order, but it isn’t quite so firm about when each thing needs to happen. It moves with you, and flexes with the needs of your kids. And life with kids cannot be inflexible!Ī daily rhythm is more about a rolling pattern that your day can follow. I felt like someone pulled the cord on that little lightbulb over my head! Rhythm vs. Scheduleīy definition, a schedule is a defined map of your time. Then I came across a lovely article by Kara Fleck on Simple Kids about creating a daily rhythm with your kids. And every day I ended the day frustrated and feeling like I had failed because I couldn’t wrangle my busy, opinionated little humans into that box. For a long time I had our morning mapped out into half-hour to hour-increments, with expectations for each block. So what I’m wondering is, if getting my child to put on a pair of shoes is an ordeal of such epic proportions, how on earth do I expect to convince him that 9:30 on-the-dot is time for chores, 9:45 exactly will be snack time, and 10:05 we will play blocks together?īut I did. he needs to show me something he forgot he needed to show me until this exact moment.his sister is looking at him in what he deems to be a “mean” way,.he does want to wear socks but not those socks,.he doesn’t like those shoes today (just today),.There are a myriad of reasons why getting my four-year-old to put his shoes on might be an ordeal, including but not limited to: Just putting his shoes on so we can leave. I am talking about getting him through the simple act of putting two shoes on his feet. I’m not even talking about getting those shoes on the right feet. It makes sense that learning how to wrangle your tiny foot into a tiny shoe for the first time might be challenging. I’m not talking about learning to put shoes on. I think it is pretty safe to say that getting a kid to put his shoes on is one of the universal struggles of parenthood.
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