Organizing Your Mornings

If you're a working mom who needs to get out the door by a certain time in the morning, you know that with kids, it can be a challenge. Especially if you have a slow riser who literally, some mornings, needs to be carried out of bed and made to stand by the toilet. In the past year I've had many morning struggles that sometime end in tears (for one, if not both of us). This is not the way I like to start my day, and so I'd like to share some tips and tricks of my own and from others that I've found to be helpful to make the morning a friendly part of the day.

Weekend

1) Plan your child's lunches before you grocery shop. I've realized that kids will eat the same thing for lunch for about a week. So I ask Tayson what meat he wants on his sandwich that week and there we go.

Here are other lunch box options he likes:

Yogurt drinks/tubes

Box of raisins

Grapes, apples, fruit cups

Granola bars

Cucumber slices

The Night Before

2) Make your lunches the night before. I know after a long day, coming home to make dinner, cleaning up, the last thing I want to do is even think about food for tomorrow. But I know that it eases the morning mayhem and it really take no longer than 10 minutes.

3) Pick out clothes the night before (yours and your child's),  and use this great idea from Living Locurto.

Here is an idea I came up with to keep my son organized and ready for school. We picked out clothes for each day of the week and hung them on a low rack for him to reach. Then I designed some cute tags to hang on each outfit. Each tag has the day of the week. The night before school, my son takes the outfit off the hangers and puts it on the floor by his door. This way he won’t forget to get dressed before coming downstairs. We usually make silly poses with the clothes and that makes it even more fun! 

You can download and print these tags for FREE!

Click Here

4) Have a chart. I made one a few years ago because Tayson is the pookiest child. So his chart has things like, get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, put on shoes, clean up toys etc. If he was able to check off the things he accomplished that day, without me getting on his case about it, he would get a check mark. Five check marks added up to a loonie for his piggy bank. We got out of the habit of doing this chart, but a few days ago he asked to do it again. Seriously! And he told me now we needed to add a new category for homework!

5) Keep a Calendar visible, this way there should be no unexpected things that pop up as you are heading out the door. Like, "Oh mommy, it's pizza day and I need $2.00!" or "My jump rope for heart money is due!" Tayson has his own scary shark calendar that I encourage him to mark up with whatever he feels is important to remember. (birthday's, school events, time with daddy) It allows him to know what's going on in his own life and feel a sense of control which hopefully leads to taking responsibility for what needs to get done.