Routines with Little Kids

"I had often found it amazing that almost every day I had the opportunity to create a new habit, either positive or negative, in my young children" Jamie C. Martin, Steady Days

Lately I've been manually jotting down a plan/structure/schedule for our day per the ideas in Steady Days (I super highly recommend this book). Overall I want us to do lots of things, and so do my kids!- connect with friends, have Arttime, Musictime, Bakingtime, Learning-letterstime, Naptime, Playtime plus I need to run errands, make dinner and do a million other things. Knowing my first priorities are connecting with my kids and finding a little time to get personal things done have helped me find that with some planning I can do all the things we need over a couple of days.

Just the simple act of committing the sched to paper is helpful and I'll usually glance at it only a couple times during the day when I get panicky about what to do next. So far Arttime has been a big hit- the other day I brought out the paint and the kids asked if they could turn one of the leftover moving boxes into a ship. They even asked if we could put up a sail and find some water. I love the way that rough planning helps us be more creative and sometimes have more fun then a rigid schedule or no plan at all.

I really feel like drawing from a big store of ways to spend the day and arranging them ahead of time in whatever works for us is one of the most important tools I've discovered so far. I used to go into work with a plan- a list of items that need doing and blocks of time for doing them, why should this be any different? My plan isn't set in stone, if my kids are clamoring for baking muffins when we had arttime down we switch, or if a park day invite pops up, we can switch out our free play time. It's just a blueprint, a starting place to shape the moving pieces of our day so we hit all the important things. It helps me see the things we did do that day, instead of the things we didn't.

The problem is that it's hard to make myself keep it up! At work I had other adults that I was interacting with who wanted to see my results and kept me accountable. Here, let's be honest, as long as nobody calls Child Services on me and my husband opens the door to a relatively peaceful home, my work is accountable to no person. To make things worse, unlike my workplace where the results of what I did could be seen right away, many of these results aren't going to be seen for years to come, maybe even decades. The shaping of minds and hearts is long term stuff that starts with each and every day. Like beads on a string there will literally be thousands and thousands of them before my kids leave home. How do I keep up the willpower to be purposeful and intentional about each one?

One answer I came upon last night is to use my fellow-moms and friends to support and be accountable to each other. Why not invest in each other's success? A couple friends I meet with in the Power of Moms learning circle have agreed to be reportees with our daily plans so I'm interested to see how that goes (I'm counting on you to count on me!) And I encourage everyone who might be interested to try out the structure idea- print out these, make your own etc.- and write back after a week with how it went. I would love to hear from you!