Home Management: Simplified & Streamlined, The Morning Routine

Last week's project for Home Management: Simplified and Streamlined was to create a workable morning routine, consisting of 3 to 5 things we do first thing each morning to get our day started off right.

I have to admit, what I wanted to do was make a list of all the things I'd like to do first thing in the morning before the children are up and call it my morning routine. It would look somewhat like this:

• Get up, do devotions, have a glass of water and a small snack
• Exercise
• Shower, get dressed
• Start a load of laundry
• Spend some time on blog stuff

As I thinking about this routine throughout the week, I found that there is just absolutely no way I am going to accomplish all of these things every morning before my children are awake every morning, or even most mornings.

For one, Katie has been waking up early--showing up in our room dressed and ready to go before 7. If I wanted to make it through everything in that list before she's up, I'd have to start my day at 5. In an ideal world, I'd love to do this. But the reality is that most mornings at 5, my tired body still needs more sleep. 

The other issue is that if I want to exercise before the children are up without waking them, I have to do it in our master bathroom, which I really don't love to do.

So, finally I resigned myself to a different morning routine.

My Morning Routine

• Get up, do devotions, drink a glass of water
• Get dressed in exercise clothes and sneakers (if I plan to work out. Otherwise, normal clothes)
• Brew coffee for Ben

And if the children are still asleep when I get through that list, I can work on the blog until they get up.

Simple, yes. But for me, for now, it works. And it will probably still work in three months when I'm caring for a newborn. It gets the day started off in the right direction without creating unrealistic expectations that set  me up for failure before the cob-webs even clear out of my brain.

What about y'all? Do you have a morning routine in place for yourselves?

Week 4 Project

Now that we've created a morning routine, we're going to use the time budgets we created for our Week 2 project to come up with a simple routine for the entire day.

By routine, I don't mean a rigid schedule. I know for me during this season of life, that simply won't work. There are diaper blow-outs (though not many since we switched to cloth!), character training issues to deal with, books to be read to cute babies, and things that get shifted around throughout the day as I see fit (and sometimes things get shifted around even if I don't see fit--ha!). While I like for things to always happen around the same time, they just don't, so having the same general flow to our days, with plenty of room for interruptions, is the best option for now. 

We'll be back next week with our own routines!

Be sure to visit Rachel's post for this week!