As a mom, have you ever looked at your role as one who is trying to work herself out of a job? Well, I do. As soon as I feel my children are ready and able to handle a job, I teach them how.

Laundry falls into this category beautifully!

When I first heard about homeschooling at Christmas time in 1988 from a friend I had known for several years, I remember my first thought was, “How does Debbie ever find time to do the laundry?” The following school year, we started homeschooling. We were a family of five back then and every week I had 11 loads of laundry to do and I remember thinking, “How will I ever find time to do all the laundry?”

No problem. Teach my children how to do their own laundry! This was quite revolutionary for me and I’ve never looked back. For the last 20 years now, I’ve only had 4 loads a week.

At the time, my children were 6, 8, and 11–first grade, third grade, and seventh grade. Laundry day consisted of them sorting their clothes, washing each load, folding them as they came out of the dryer, then putting them all away in drawers and the closet and returning the laundry basket to the laundry room by bedtime that evening.

Each was assigned a particular day of the week to wash their dirty clothes. If you were not able to accomplish this on your specific day, and it had to be for a very good reason, you would have to either wait until next week when your day came around, or you could do it on another person’s day, after they were done with their laundry.

I’ve taught them how to treat stains. I’ve even given each of them a laundry stick to keep in their bedroom so they can treat any stain before it goes into their hamper.

Consider buying each of them their own laundry basket. I did this for the two youngest and they even decorated them with stickers and magic markers. Seven years later, they still have some of the markings from back then. This helps to give them a feeling of ownership and responsibility for their own stuff.

Because the youngest of the three oldest children started doing his own laundry at the age of 6, we had the oldest of our two youngest kids start then, too. (We fondly identify our children as the “first batch” and “second batch” of children. There’s a story here I will save for later.)

It was about six month later when the youngest requested she be allowed to start doing her own laundry like big brother. After warnings such as, “Once you start, there’s no turning back,” I proceeded to teach her as well. While I would have to come help get her clothes out of the bottom of the washing machine, she learned quite quickly. Hurrah! I made it through childhood laundry! It only took me 23 years!

Now, let me warn you. There will be times when you will have to look at wrinkled clothing on your children or there’s stains here and there. You just have to decide if you’re willing to pay the price.

Now, if you have children you believe would never do their laundry, then as a parent, it’s your job to inflict penalties. Don’t let them play outside or on the computer until they’re done. Do what it takes to make it happen. It’s worth it!

And you know, one of the best things about teaching my own children to do their own laundry has been that for the last 23 years, I never have to answer the question, “Mom, do you know if my __________ is clean!”

This freedom can be yours as well whenever you’re ready to take the plunge.

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Well, today is November 3rd and I’ve decided it’s officially time to start my holiday planning. We’re in a new house this year so that will mean lots of new Christmas decorating fun. But first things first–I need to plan for Thanksgiving. We’re hosting two Thanksgiving dinners at our house this year on two different days. So, I’ve been putting my thinking cap on today for planning menus and collecting recipes so I can get ahead of the game.

One of my favorite websites is All Recipes.com. The number of recipes available is nearly endless. A great feature is the review section for every recipe. It’s always helpful to get suggestions for tweaking a recipe to add a personal touch or extra flavor. I always try to read the reviews because I love to tweak recipes. My favorite feature that really helps me prepare for large groups is the recipe calculator. It will scale a recipe’s ingredients for the exact number of servings you need.

One of the more simple things that has really helped me with my planning in the past is to write out my menu and identify how each item will be prepared. This really helps when you discover what dishes can be prepared ahead of time. It has also taught me to use my crock pot whenever possible. This year I plan on making my mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and my dressing in a crock pot.

I’m sure my thoughts will be side tracked with lots of holiday plans in the days to come. So check back for more tips and recipes for the upcoming holiday season.

I remember the time several years ago when I asked each member of the family, “What is your favorite dish at Thanksgiving?” After I did this, I had my menu for that year! While I can’t remember what everyone voted for, it was this year when Mary Lou punch became a family favorite from that point on. Click on “A Scrumptuous Punch” to find this delicious recipe.

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One of the challenges of living together as a multigenerational family is laundry. Ten people generate a lot of dirty clothes. I believe we do between 18–20 loads of laundry weekly. That’s a lot of laundry detergent, dryer sheets, clothes, and time!

Currently, we only have one washer and one dryer. We’ve talked about purchasing additional ones, but so far we seem to be doing fine with what we have.

Here are a few things we’ve learned to do to help keep this area of life orderly:

Assign days of the week: Everyone has a certain day of the week to wash their clothes. Monday: Jim and Vickie; Tuesday: Jeremy; Wednesday: Grace; Thursday and Friday: Faith, Shawn and children; Saturday: Nanny; Sunday: we give the washer and dryer a break, unless something unusual needs to be cleaned.

Teach Children to Do Their Own Laundry: If you will teach your children to do their own laundry at a young age, it can free your time up considerably. While Faith has not done this with her children, she grew up doing this, along with the rest of her siblings. It can be one more way to help teach children responsibility as well. (For a discussion on how to teach your children to do their laundry, you can read about how I did this years ago here.)

Keep Laundry Supplies Well Stocked: We keep our supplies on a shelf right over the washer and dryer so they are easy to see. We are learning to have a pretty good idea of how much detergent and dryer sheets we use each month. As the grocery shoppers, Faith and I keep tabs on the status of supplies and write these items on the big marker board when we are close to running out.

Here’s a tip if you love the convenience of dryer sheets like we do: Tear the next one you use in half. For most loads, you don’t need to use a whole sheet at all. There’s more than even “stuff” included in half a dryer sheet to make your clothes soft and static free. (Be sure to teach your children to do this, too.)

Your package of dryer sheets will go twice as far, unless you cut them into thirds and fourths like Faith and I used to do a long time ago. Now we’re just too busy, or lazy, to bother doing this.

And one final tip:

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Years ago, my husband Jim was reading a book on how to keep our home organized. Yes, I know you’re probably thinking, “Why was her husband reading this instead of her?” Well, if you knew my husband, you would know that he reads just about anything in print, he reads quickly, and then is great at giving me the high points of whatever book he’s just finished. So, if I need some information quickly, I have him read the book!

Anyway, I remember he shared three main points with me on how to feel successful at home and to keep things running smoothly on a daily basis. I decided to analyze these areas and to make an effort to stay on top of them. It really did help me back then and I continue to make these areas a priority so I don’t feel so overwhelmed.

Now that we have become a multigenerational household of 10 people, Faith and I are always looking for ways to stay on top of these three areas listed below. We focus on one or more of them daily so we never feel like life is out of control which could easily happen around here. So, if you ever have days when you’re trying to decide what “fights” to battle and where to start in your home to restore some order, we invite you to attack these three and see if it doesn’t help you, too.

Know What’s for Dinner by 9 a.m. in the Morning

When we know what’s for dinner each night, it greatly relieves tension and stress around here. Whether it’s dinner at church, eating out, or a home-cooked meal, just knowing how this part of our day will be taken care of is a huge stress reliever.

Whether you use your own menu planning system, or subscribe to ones on the Web as we have in the past, it’s important to have an accurate idea of how you will be feeding your crew that night, beginning at the start of the day.

Keep the Entryway of Your Home Decluttered

First impressions are important, even when it is your own home. If you’ve been gone on an errand or are coming back from a vacation, the appearance and maintenance of your main entrance into your home is vital. Whether you enter through the front door or your garage entrance, keep this area neat and inviting. Nobody enjoys stepping over shoes, toys, and other paraphernalia scattered across the floor (plus this can be dangerous, too.)

We have done this in our home by constructing a control center at the front door. This helps us with packages to mail or that have been delivered, everybody’s keys, a place for messages, as well as a small trash can. This has greatly helped us to keep order and neatness by our entryway.

Keep the Laundry Caught Up

The necessity of washing clothes doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon–laundry just isn’t going to go away. Whether you wash clothes everyday, or once a week like we do, you definitely don’t want to let dirty clothes pile up, or clean clothes remain stuck in baskets.

If you have time, you can certainly teach your children how to do their own laundry as I have. I wrote a post about how we handle laundry at our house and it is a life skill that they will certainly need when they start to live on their own. It has freed me up to do many other things with my time and has taught my children responsibility for their own clothing. Although Faith grew up under this system, she has chosen to handle her laundry days differently from me, yet does make this a priority for her family, too.

We each have one day a week when we do our laundry which allows us to feel like that chore is done at the end of the day. However, some don’t have the luxury of several hours at home to accomplish this task. For you it may consist of starting a load each morning as you leave the house; then putting it into the dryer once you arrive home.

Get your kids involved in helping with this. Put hampers in bedrooms and bathrooms that have two or three divisions to them. Then the kids can sort whites, lights and darks at the end of the day. This will help speed up the process when it comes time to laundering them.

Whether or not you choose to deal with three areas of your home is up to you. I will tell you that this little bit of information has helped me more than I realized, once I understood how vital they are in maintaining order in our home, especially now that we have become a multi-generational household. Meal planning is at the top of the list for sure, followed by keeping the entryway decluttered and laundry caught up.

Faith and I encourage you to come up with a system, then work your system. Starting with these three will definitely help keep those feelings of being overwhelmed at bay.

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Are you a stressed out mom running from place to place with no time to spare? Do you have so many things on your mental To Do List that you get worn out just thinking about all the things you need to get done? We live in an extremely busy and stressed out culture. It can seem nearly impossible to conquer the busyness beast.

So what do you do? Listed below are Ron Edmonson’s 10 Ways to Create Time Margin. I read a lot about the benefits of margin in your life and there are many good benefits including better health and stronger relationship. But Ron has provided some excellent way to go about creating the margin we so desperately need. I need this list as much as anyone (as you can probably tell since this was supposed to be yesterday’s post that I didn’t get done until now).

1. Put God first.

It’s amazing in my week and day if I start the day talking to God about my day. If I ask God for margin in my time and to help me complete my “to do” list, He actually seems to listen and help me. (Try it!)

2. Prioritize your life.

It is important to have a life purpose. What do you value most? Without knowing this we find ourselves chasing after many things that have little value.

3. Make sure your priorities line up with your desires.

That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it is not. Many times, we say our purpose is one thing, but what we actually do is something entirely different. That is often because people are going to do what people want to do. We may need to ask God to change our heart and plant in us His desires.

4. Stop unnecessary time-wasters.

If you “veg” out every night on 3+ hours of television or surfing the net, don’t be surprised that you didn’t get a blog post written or spend quality time with your children. Most of us form bad habits or have unorganized methods of doing something that waste bulks of our time. Make a list of what you spend the most time doing and see if there are places you can cut. (I suspect there will be.)

5. Work smarter.

I can’t imagine being successful and leading a team without some system of calendaring your week or keeping a planner, yet I know so many pastors and other ministers who simply handle things as they come up rather than work with a plan. The benefit of organization is that you can do what you need to do more efficiently and faster and be more productive.

6. Schedule times to organize.

This is so important, but most people don’t do it. Spending an hour or two actually planning the week will make the whole week more productive. Usually for me this is the first part of my week. If I know where I’m headed and my work space is organized for efficiency, it’s much easier to get everything done and still handle distractions, which are sure to come.

7. Do the most necessary things first.

You may have tried the A/B/C list of scheduling priorities. It doesn’t matter what system you use, but the important thing is that you have one and use it to help your rate of completion.

8. Don’t say yes to everything.

Be picky with your time allotment based again on your end priorities and goals.

9. Schedule down time.

Especially when my boys were younger, I would write on my calendar time for them. That may sound mechanical, but it allows you to be there and keeps things and others from filling up your schedule.

10. Evaluate your schedule often.

Plans should not be implemented and then ignored. Develop your plan to create margin in your life, then periodically review the plan to see how you are doing and what needs to be changed.

Do you have any tips for creating more margin in your life? We’d love to hear from you if you do.

Faith, I remember when Dad and I decided to disconnect the t.v. from the cable for a week back in 1989 as a experiment to see what would happen. Much to my amazement, we were all pretty happy with the idea of doing it permanently.

While many would think we were crazy for doing it, I’ve come to realize that I get so much done that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. No television has freed me up to read extensively, play games with my children, read aloud to them, and not have to compete with the television for my family’s time.

Certainly there are occasions when I do watch it at someone else’s house, but I have found it dramatically calmed down our home, brought peace, greater productivity, and margin to our family when we unplugged.

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Before we became a multi-generational family, I had been running our home for 36 years. During these years of raising five children, I’ve accumulated several sets of sheets–solid ones, floral ones, stripes, twin, double, queen and king.

With so many different sized beds and sheet sets in all different patterns, colors, and sizes, it can be tedious to find those tiny little tags sewn in the corners of the sheets in order to know which ones fit which beds. On occasion I have found myself dreading having to go to the linen closet to get sheets when it’s time to change the bed linens.

Since we have combined households, we now have eight beds and two for guests–like when our other married children visit. Here are a few tips we’ve learned along the way to organize this issue and some of which we have incorporated into our lifestyle. Maybe you’ll find something helpful you can use at your house.

Organizing Sheets

1. Make a decision now to purchase different patterns and colors for different sized beds in your home. Consider buying solid colors for your king-sized bed; floral patterns for the twin; stripes for the double, etc. This can be especially helpful when you move and have all your sheets thrown together in a big box. Ask me how I know!

2. When folding your sheets on laundry day, place a set inside one of the pillowcases included in the set. This will keep all the linens of the set together and allow them to sit neatly on the shelf. How’s that for easy?

3. What I do now is have two or three sets of sheets for each bed and keep them in the bedroom closet where a particular bed lives. Since everyone does their own laundry, it makes the linens easy to find, handy for making the bed, and convenient for washing the dirty ones. Once their laundry is done, the clean sheets go right back into their respective closets to wait for the next time.

This has drastically solved the problem of trying to figure out which sheets fit which beds.

4. Color-code the sheets for each bedroom. Our son has blue, our daughter has purple and lime green, etc. This is especially helpful if someone forgets to take their sheets to their room on laundry day.

How about you Faith? Any comments?

Ah Man! Here I was all excited to share the tip of putting the sheets inside the pillow case and you had it on the post already. Oh well.

I love this tip! It’s crazy how hard it can be to find the pillow cases that go with the sheets you want. This works out great to solve this problem!!

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Clutter. Where in the world does it come from? Sometimes I find myself wondering who brought in all this stuff while I wasn’t looking.

As two families who have decided to live together as a multi-generational family permanently, we can tell you about clutter! Combining two households’ worth of belongings into one has caused us to do a lot of decluttering.

We thought it would be helpful to mention a few keys points on how to weed things out around your home, but before we talk about that, here are some things to realize about clutter:

1. It creates a chaotic environment. “A place for everything, and everything in it’s place” is impossible
2. You have to work harder because things have to be moved, rearranged, and lifted
3. It’s hard to find things
4. Things get broken and lost
5. It’s incredibly stressful when you are expecting company
6. It can cause you to duplicate things you already own. (Ask me how I know!)
7. It can even get us in trouble with our monthly bills and other expenses because papers get buried or misplaced

Now you need to be reminded of one very important fact–it didn’t happen overnight and it will take some time to bring things back under control. Just as it takes time to get your body back in shape after having a baby, it will take time to get your home back in shape as well. It will ultimately require developing new habits for dealing with clutter.

Steps to Help Bring Order

#1 Learn to put things away where they belong by the end of the day.

Decide on a few key areas of your home that get out of control on a regular basis.

• Is it dirty dishes in the sink? Decide to unload the dishwasher first thing in the morning and add dirty dishes to it throughout the day. Avoid putting any into the sink.
• How about clothes? Place hampers in convenient places throughout the house. Have one in each child’s bedroom or bathroom. At bedtime, make children clean them off their floor before tucking them into bed.
• How about toys? Make a point of picking them up on the way to naptime and bedtime. Sometimes, twice a day isn’t enough!
• What about books? Whether you homeschool your children like we do or you read a lot, have bookshelves in convenient places and put them away when you’re done with them. Avoid stacking them whenever possible.

#2 Learn to throw things away you know you won’t use again.

Be honest now–how many times have you saved something thinking you might need it someday? While there is a place for a few things to tuck away for a rainy day, we tend to clutter up our lives with stuff we think we’ll need someday.

Don Aslett shares in his book, Clutter’s Last Stand (a great book on decluttering by the way) a helpful way of doing this. Begin by packing a box with stuff you think you’ll need sometime, date the box, and hold on to it for six months. If after six months you haven’t even opened it, keep it closed up and give it away. Don’t re-evaluate! Follow through with your plan.

#3 Keep individual members of the family responsible for their own stuff.

Obviously, a small baby is not able to do this, but your husband and older children can deal with their own stuff. As soon as possible, teach your children to declutter their old toys and clothing. You could even encourage and teach them how to use eBay to make some spare change on items they no longer want, with your permission, of course.

#4 Keep the trashcan conveniently located whenever you go through the mail.

Catalogs, fliers, newspapers and magazines can stack up and junk up your home quickly. Keep your trashcan right by you whenever you go through the daily mail. You’ll love how it makes you feel. (We have built our own control center by our front door to help all of us handle this issue. More about this in a later post).

Clearly, this is not an exhaustive list of things to do, but it’s a great place to start.

Faith has become quite an expert on minimizing our stuff around here. If you would like to read more about her journey and how decluttering helped her, be sure to check out her blog at Minimalist At Home. She’s doing an amazing work over there.

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I’ve starting taking baby steps in my journey towards Minimalism and while it’s a small one, at least it’s forward progress. I hope you’ll be back to join me on my quest.

Christmas is roughly three months away. This year I plan to be more proactive with my planning, purchasing, and purging of junk around here instead of letting it sneak up and overwhelm me like most years. Every year I try to get rid of old, broken, and just generally ignored toys that have accumulated before more toys show up on Christmas morning. This year I’ve decided to start that process much earlier and hopefully stop the cycle.

Getting rid of the broken toys. This may seem easy to most folks and it should be. However, most of the time I have to perform this seemingly easy step in secret because my oldest child carries an intense emotional attachment to his stuff. Everything has a story behind it for him or a beloved memory of when he played with it. He saves slips of paper, stickers, broken toys that were once favorites, trash that he claims is part of his “collection”, and even gets upset when I try to hand down his outgrown clothes to his younger brother. So, this first step requires the kids being gone so they don’t see me cramming black trash bags full of junk and running them to the trashcans like I’m some sort of spy running a covert operation.

Prioritize don’t organize. I’ve made the mistake in the past of making the second step be organizing the rest of the toys that I haven’t purged. I spent a ton of time sorting countless trinkets, action figures, toy cars, and game pieces into all these separate bins. What I found was that these toys really weren’t being played with and loved even though they kept finding their way onto the floor. Plus, when it was time to put things away they would get dumped back together again because no one understood the sorting method except me. So this time I’m putting some real energy into observing what they actually spend their time playing with. When other kids come over to play the choices vary some but not a whole lot. If it doesn’t get played with on a regular basis then it is outta here!

Speak their language. You may want to involve your kids in the purging process. It’s great if you can explain to them the need to give toys away to other kids who don’t have toys to play with. Sometimes that has worked for me. Unfortunately, that concept is sometimes too vague for my kids. What did make it real for them was me saying “Ok, look. No new toys are moving in until some of these old toys get moved out.” I’ll sit out some boxes and we’re not done until the boxes are full. One of their vices is Nerf guns. Holy cow do my boys love those Nerf guns! There isn’t a birthday or Christmas that goes by that they don’t ask for one. During the purging process I make them pick out their favorites and I usually give them a number they are limited to. Then the rest have to be given away.

Buy for quality not for quantity. This is my new catch phrase…especially with Christmas and a couple birthdays coming soon. After I finish writing this I am going to ask my kids to start thinking about what they really want for Christmas. My guess is that they already have a pretty good idea. Then that’s what I’m going to plan on for Christmas. I don’t know why we always seem to purchase extra stuff that I figure they’ll like but I know not really love just so they can have fun opening things on Christmas. I hate realizing that we’ve been sucked into the mentality that your birthdays and Christmas need to be filled with piles of packages to open. I also won’t be doing any junky stocking stuffers from the Dollar Store this year.

So this begins my “Quest for Less” and I hope to have some follow-up posts to go with this little series of mine. Do you have any tips for purging the toys around your house or making Christmas gifts more meaningful? I’d love to hear them.

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Have you seen those new shows on Hoarding? They’re terrifying and disgusting. The part that is terrifying to me is that none of those people who are literally living inside a landfill planned to end up that way. They didn’t just wake up one morning and say, “Hmm, I think I’ll turn into a hoarder and keep everything forever.” Granted these are extreme cases but it’s scary how things can sneak up on you when it comes to household clutter and saving things “just because” we might have use for them someday.

I’ve started reading up on Minimalism. I don’t mean minimalism in relation to painting or performance arts, but rather the quest of being content with living with less. I read a great post today called “The Unmistakable Freedom of Contentment and How to Achieve It.” I wouldn’t consider myself discontented but I need to make that shift towards getting rid of the excess and paring down our lives to get free of the junk and the obligations that having so much “stuff” carries with it.

My two main take away thoughts from the article are:
1) “Not only does contentment provide the opportunity for minimalism, it also reduces your stress level, improves your outlook, relaxes your body, and makes your life enjoyable.” — How awesome is that?! I want that! Less stress, more relaxation, and a more enjoyable life with my family. That is exactly what I want.

2) “Be content with what you have, never with what you are. Never stop learning, growing, or discovering. Take pride in your personhood and the progress that you have made, but never become so content that you cannot find room for improvement. Contentment is not the same as complacency.” — Can I get an “amen?” I just have this urge to cheer for some reason.

In the future I hope to come back to this topic with revelations I’m having and progress I’ve made. As I was reading this morning, it became abundantly clear to me that it’s time to attack the kids’ toys again since I seem to keep picking up the same stuff over and over again, yet I never really see anyone playing with what I’m picking up.

Faith, when you first started talking about minimalism, I admit I wasn’t quite sure what you meant by it. Yet, having moved 24 different times in my life, I certainly knew about dejunking and making choices of things I wanted to keep, pack, and cart around the country.

As I’ve come to understand more of what the term “minimalism” means, I see some similarities to what I’ve done in the past. Yet, I’ve also come to see that it means making long-lasting choices of what is precious, valuable, and worthy of my time, money, and efforts.

Thank you for your encouragement and patience as we continue to dejunk the kitchen, the closets, books, and garage. It is certainly a new, purposeful adventure around here and I look forward to where we will go as a household of 10. My prayer is that we will soon get to enjoy the fruits of our labor as we have minimalized two households into one.

Note: Since writing this post, I have passionately latched on to the concept of minimalism, especially as it relates to family and living in a household of 10 people. You can read more about my journey and quest for less at Minimalist at Home.

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If you are a stay-at-home mom, and in particular, a sidetracked one like us, finding a regular routine can be a challenge. While we’re all busy “doing things,” having a routine and methodical progression to the day may be lacking. Sometimes, it is just difficult to feel successful or to see you are making progress when there is not a definite order to the day.

Throughout our careers as stay-at-home moms, our daily routines have changed with the different seasons in our lives. Right now, I only have two of five children left at home–ages 13 and soon to be 15. Faith, on the other hand, has a 9 year old, 6 year old, and one that will be a year old in a couple of weeks. Mornings can look very different for the two of us.

Here’s what a “normal” morning looks like for me in this season of my life:

1. Wake up and pour the coffee, which has already perked because it was prepared and put on a timer the night before.
2. Enjoy coffee for 45 minutes while my husband and I talk.
3. Exercise
4. Shower and get dressed for the day
5. Eat breakfast and then send hubby off to work
6. Have some quiet time, read my Bible, answer emails, and write while my children begin their schoolwork

My morning routine is fairly similar. My hubby and I absolutely cannot start a day without coffee. We like to enjoy it for 30 – 45 minutes every day. There isn’t always a lot of talking going on depending on how tired we are, but just being together and starting the day off slowly makes it special and enjoyable.

Melody usually joins us during coffee time and she’ll enjoy her bottle while we drink our coffee. The boys usually wake up in time to come snuggle up with us before daddy has to get ready for work. I make breakfast for Shawn while he’s in the shower and then send him off to work once he’s kissed us all and has been given Connor’s customary goodbye, “Bye, Daddy I love you unlimited. Love you, hugs & kisses. I love you more than anything in the whole wide world.” Every time one or both of us leaves the house, his goodbye is always the same…and it makes me smile every single time.

Once Shawn is gone I feed the kids and I finish my coffee and eat some breakfast. I check email and putter around the house until Melody takes her morning nap. My new goal is to exercise while Melody is sleeping. It’s working well so far, but once I exercise and get cleaned up and ready for the day, she’s usually back up. Add in a few morning chores and it’s already 11:00am and we haven’t started school yet. So I’m working on the morning routine to get it more streamlined and moving it earlier.

Night-time routines have been pretty much the same for me for many years. It’s a routine I like and it serves me well.

1. As Jim is tucking the children in (and yes, he still does this ) I go to the kitchen to prepare the coffee for morning
2. Start the dishwasher if it needs run
3. Shut down the kitchen, make sure the doors are locked
4. Turn on the alarm and walk down the hallway
5. Finish any work on my computer
6. Get dressed for bed and take meds

I never really thought about the importance of good night-time routine until I joined Fly Lady. It was there that I learned how influential your bedtime routine is for starting your morning off to a good start. She talks about spending some time picking up the main areas of your house so you’re greeted with a clean kitchen and living room in the morning. This makes such a difference to me!

She also suggests starting a To Do list for the next day, gathering items you don’t want to forget, laying out clothes the night before and even setting the table for breakfast. I never would have thought of those things but they can help so much with feeling organized when you are in a hurry.

My favorite part is how Fly Lady makes it a point to tell you to focus on yourself before going to bed. Journaling and nightly bubble baths are part of the  night-time routine. How great is that?!

Whatever your schedule looks like it’s important to find a routine that works for you and your family and stick to it. It helps your children fall into natural habits along with eating and sleep patterns. It also helps so that when you inevitably DO get sidetracked, you know where you left off and how to find your way back on course.

We’re always interested in hearing what routines and schedules work for other moms. Feel free to leave us a comment and let us know what works, and what doesn’t work for you.

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