5 Routines That Are Supporting Our Life As A Family Right Now

Sep 6

As someone who personally loves hearing about routines that people use to support their life, I figured why not share the ones that are supporting us so well right now and if you like the sound of one or two of them (or all of them) you can give them a shot!! Some of them we have been doing for a long time, some are newer routines but they all support just how our household runs and just help us keep our head on straight so here we go!

These are in no particular order by the way but the first routine we are going to walk about is:

01 Doing a Morning Start Activity with our 2.5-year-old

So if you didn’t know- we did start doing some homeschooling last month for preschool with my oldest, Luke. He was going to a preschool from last October until June, but we took him out, and I wanted to really keep up with things he was learning in school because he was learning so much. So after some research, we started a preschool curriculum from Busy Toddler. We really like it but we are also adjusting it slightly to fit our schedule and family life best because there are times we just don’t get to everything that the curriculum has planned or we substitute things, etc.

Along with that, I started to really want something for Luke to be able to get up in the morning and do that wasn’t watching TV. There was a period of time that every morning he would ask to watch a show and I don’t know, it was kind of starting to drive me nuts, and it just wasn’t the way that I wanted us to start our day. So we started to do a version of “morning baskets” where he would have toys set out to play with in the morning and that worked for a while but what has really worked for us is having a morning start activity.

I first saw this idea from @learningfromkelsey on Instagram and she has some great ideas for it but I have also adjusted it or come up with our own ideas based on the curriculum we are using with Busy Toddler, some Pinterest activities, or even just based on Lukes interests! If you didn’t know, I have my masters in education and I taught first grade for a couple of years and then I was a literacy specialist for middle school my last year. So this stuff just lights me up. But basically, our morning start activity reminds me so much of “morning meetings” I used to do with my first graders so if you are a teacher, you can probably picture it.

Basically, it’s just some sort of learning activity that Luke can do after he gets up in the morning and it’s usually while I am cooking breakfast that we do it. We set it up at the kitchen island so he stands on his kitchen tower and does the activity!

Like I said, I’ve gotten ideas for these from everywhere and then made some up myself but they are usually based on what he is learning that week in our preschool lessons. For example: one day we were learning about the color yellow, so his activity was to color all of the items I drew for him yellow. Another day we were learning about apples, so I drew some apple trees and he put dot stickers on the trees to make “apples”. There are SO many things you can do and that has really just not only given him something to do while I am cooking, but I think he also looks forward to it being there every morning.

Now this is something I set up before I go to bed. We will talk about our nightly reset routine next but this is a part of that routine! I set it up the night before (we only do this M-F by the way), I always write a little note to go with it that I read to him when I tell him the instructions and it’s honestly really fun for me to set up for him too! And he no longer asks for screentime so it’s a win!

02 Nightly Reset

Okay ever since becoming a parent 2.5 years ago- our nightly reset has always been one of the TOP routines that support us.

I’ve talked about this before but I am just not a super solid morning routine person right now. I mean, I have a morning routine, but it’s usually done with my kids and it’s just how we start our day. But our nightly reset is like what we do to reset our home, reset our minds, and just prepare for the next day and when we take the time to do it, our mornings just go so much smoother.

So for our nightly reset, we do these 5 things. And I say we because my husband helps me with 3 out of 5 things

❋ Load the dishwasher

❋ Clean the kitchen

❋ Pick up all the toys/random items and put them away

❋ Plan the next day

❋ Set up morning start activity

The first three are well, obvious. We all know what that looks like. And listen, I know you are tired at the end of the day. Girl, so am I trust me. But I literally will set a timer for 15-25 minutes and just get after it. It doesn’t take that long even when it looks like a bomb went off in our house lol. And it feels so much better to wake up to.

In terms of planning the next day, I always take my daily notepad, my planner, and my Google calendar and I plan out the next day. My to-do list, meetings and appointments, etc. I use Hustle Sanely planning products and they support my life SO well I truly cannot recommend them enough & Jess is one of my favorite people in the world and I am so grateful for her. Right now I am using the daily notepad combined with my Google Cal but once her launch happens I will have the daily planner and I can’t wait.

But anyway, this part of my routine supports me well because I already have a plan going into the day before it even starts. I was finding for a while that I was trying to build a plan the day of and it was a mess. I constantly was feeling behind or just like forgetting things and what-not and when I started planning out my days the night before, I just felt prepared to go into the next day feeling more intentional with my time and actually get stuff done instead of wondering what needed to get done, ya know?

And then we talked about the morning start activity!

Listen, this nightly reset does not happen every night. Or at least not every task. But We notice a huge difference when we do at least parts of it if we don’t get to all of it. It just really sets the intention for the next day and then our mornings are an extension of that!

03 Quiet Time

Our 3rd routine that’s working well for us right now is quiet time. So I alluded to this a little on IG but we started implementing QT with Luke because he stopped taking naps completely for almost two weeks and we were all feeling it lol. So we decided to switch things up and we converted his bed to a toddler bed (he had never tried to climb out of it or anything so we just figured we would switch him when he did or when he didn’t fit anymore but decided that he was probably showing us he was ready by ditching the naps), and we rearranged his room and added some safe toys and activities for him to do during his quiet time.

Then we have a conversation with him about what quiet time is and what he could do during that time. Now obviously he is 2.5 – so his conversation was rather simple and clear so that he could understand! I just told him that during quiet time, he can read books or play with his cars and stuffies, or he could take a nap! He could pick what he did, but he just had to stay in his room and rest for a little bit and mommy would come get him when quiet time was over.

Now the first 2-3 days we obviously had this conversation a lot. And just setting expectations and boundaries with his newfound freedom. But the funniest thing about this is that when we started doing quiet time instead of nap time, he started taking more naps. This is actually something a few of you on Instagram told me happened with your kids too and was what really encouraged me to give this a shot.

Honestly Luke thrives on choice, but it never occurred to me that when he could choose whether he takes a nap or not, he would actually choose to.

He doesn’t take a nap every day. In some quiet times, he just sits in his room and plays and reads books. And after about an hour or so, I go in and get him to have a snack. And I am totally good with this – that is his version of rest that day! But some days, he plays for a little bit and then crawls into his bed, lays down, and falls asleep. And when he gets up, he just comes out and finds me and we keep going with our day.

We are a couple of weeks into this now and I still do some reminders or resets to encourage rest – but overall it’s been going really well. And I know a big question I have gotten is nighttime, and honestly, nights have been even easier with this routine. He goes to bed MUCH easier, and then in the mornings, he just gets up and comes straight into our room or finds us in the kitchen or living room if we happen to get up before him. But he is an early riser, 6 a.m. on the dot is usually when I hear the door creak open, so he is my little alarm clock right now.

04 Weekly Family Meetings

The 4th routine that we are loving right now is weekly family meetings. Now I got this practice from my friend Jess Massey over at Hustle Sanely, here is her podcast episode where she talks about these – but this has made a huge difference in our family's life… I am dead serious.

My husband works in the golf industry as an assistant golf pro at a golf course… He also gives golf lessons and he is going through the PGA program. His schedule is all over the place and it changes every week. And then you pair that with me and owning a business and having two toddlers – our schedules can be utter chaos if we let them.

But to avoid that from happening, we started doing weekly family meetings. And like I said, Jess has a whole framework and template you can follow and we go through some of the questions with that, but we also hit on other things as well!

So for our weekly meeting, we choose a day of the week – right now they are Thursday nights – and we have a little date night at home! We either cook a yummy dinner or grab takeout – and after the kids go to bed we sit down together and we go over the following questions from Jess’ framework:

What events do we have coming up this week? Do we need to arrange childcare?
What are we each doing our self-care this week?
What goals or projects are each of us working toward this week that we need support in? What kind of support do we need?

And then we have three other questions that we added that help our life specifically:

What workouts are we doing this week? (We like to go to our gym classes together when we can, and we will sign up for them at this time)
What dinners do we have planned/meals do we want to prep? (This helps us with creating a grocery list to go shopping over the weekend)
How can we pray for each other/our family this week? (Pretty self-explanatory but it’s been a goal of mine to be intentional with prayer and this is one way that we can do this for each other and our family)

During this time we also go over our budget for the week (what bills are coming out, what expenses are coming up, etc.) and we make sure everything that needs to be in our Google Calendar is. We also have a fridge dry-erase calendar we fill out which my husband really loves bc he isn’t super techy lol but I live by my Google calendar so we just do both. And he is starting to actually like the Google calendar because he can check it when he is at work talking to clients and whatnot so it’s starting to grow on him I think.

So funny story – we were really diligent about this for a few weeks, and then one week life got crazy (we were doing these meetings on Saturday or Sunday and that just wasn’t working bc it would get pushed and then the week was already here lol. So we moved it and it’s working better!) – and we didn’t do the meeting that week.

We both felt like we were chickens running around with our heads cut off. We didn’t really know what the other person’s schedule was, we didn’t know what dinners were planned, it was just kinda of a hot mess.

So then one day Curtis goes “can we do our weekly meeting tonight?” YOU GUYS- This whole weekly meeting thing was my idea that I got from Jess and I brought it to him and he agreed. My husband is very chill and low key, and just goes with the flow for most part so I didn’t REALLY know if he was just doing the meetings because I wanted to or because he wanted to also. But this is something that he actually finds really helpful and supportive in our life – to the point where he is asking to make sure we do it haha. It has made that big of a difference!

We also do a monthly meeting that Jess talks about too – so again I will link that podcast in the show notes so you can take a listen and implement if that is something that sounds like you could use in your life!

05 One Big Laundry Day

Okay the last routine is really simple and maybe boring but honestly has been really freeing for me haha. And that is going back to having one big laundry day.

For a long time I was trying the whole one load of laundry a day thing – but what I was finding was that one load of laundry was taking up the only time I really had to do chores so other things were getting pushed to the side and procrastinated, and then remembering to do said one load of laundry was another thing.

So I actually heard Kelly from @thecarmom talk about this and was like OMG that is ME and she shared how she went back to doing one big laundry day and how it was really just so much better for her life and so I went back to one big laundry day and wow, yeah this is what works best for us – at least right now!!

My husband usually does his own laundry bc he does it more than once a week since he has things he wears for work multiple times a week, and he does help me with other laundry too if I need it but I have basically just been picking one day (usually Saturday) to wash all of the boy’s clothes together, and then I do my own laundry! I don’t work on the weekends and the weekends are just sacred family and take care of our home days so during nap times I take time to watch a TV show and fold laundry or clean something that needs cleaning, etc. I don’t really watch TV during the week because I am working during nap times which is really the only downtime we have so it’s kind of a nice little treat on the weekends. I also don’t really plan to do any other house chores on Saturdays because I know I will be doing a lot of laundry that day. The other chores are scheduled throughout the week to make this possible. I just will do our nightly reset and pick up here and there.

So anyway, if you feel like you are drowning in laundry and you are trying to do the “one load a day” method and it just isn’t working for you – maybe try just knocking it out start-to-finish one day a week! It’s been helpful for us in this season and I don’t know there’s just something about having all the clothes clean and put away at the end of the day.

Okay, so there you have it! 5 routines that are supporting our family well right now! I know that these might not fit everyone’s lifestyle and that’s totally cool you don’t have to implement any of them! But I love hearing about how other families manage their homes and what is working well for them so I figured I would share!

Before you go – if you loved this blog post or you have loved any of the episodes we have brought you thus far on the Mom’s Day Out podcast – I would love it so much if you took 2 minutes to rate and review it on iTunes. Seriously it is so easy, and it is SO helpful to the show and just getting the word out about MDO and our mission of doing motherhood together! Reviews really, really matter a whole lot so it would mean the world to me if you could just write what you love about the show or why you listen in every week! And if you want to share this episode on your social media, feel free to tag me @yourbffkate and @momsdayout.co on Instagram!

Oh and mama… if no one has told you yet today – you are doing a great job.

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