A Peaceful Morning Routine
By: Bebe Khuê Jacobs
Tags: Parenting, Lifehacks, Self Improvement, Family, Time Management

How to tame the chaos of the family morning routine and catch a breath before we all start to jump on top of each other.

A glimmer of sunlight catches your eyes as you stretch your rested body and rise out of bed. You fluff the pillows, make the bed, wash your face, brush your teeth, moisturize your hands and face, put on a little blush and eyeliner, and you’re ready to face the day. You walk downstairs to your kitchen and your husband hands you a steamy cup of coffee and greets you with, “Good morning dear!” You walk over to sit down at the dining table and your placemat is set with a napkin, utensils, and a beautiful plate of scrambled eggs on toast. You lift the aromatic toast to have a bite as you hear approaching footsteps as your children, one by one, ask, “Salt?” “Pepper?” and each peck you lightly on your cheek, whispering, “We love you!”

Ok! You can wake up now because that ain’t reality! You might have been fed that obnoxious ideal from Hollywood or your repressed subconscious, but that stuff ain’t real! And that certainly ain’t how I wake up each morning.

It would go from asking nicely, “Honey, it’s time to wake up!”

“It’s getting late, please get up!”

“Did you guys not hear the alarm? It has been going off for the last 15 minutes!”

“Get up NOW! You’re lucky you just have to roll out of bed to go to school!”

“It’s 8:45 am already! You have 15 minutes to get to class. Get up now!”

To angry, “Are you kidding me?!??! What the $#%* are you still doing in bed? It’s 8:50!”

To desperation, “I’m so sorry you guys stayed up so late last night. Please get up. It’s 8:55 am and you have less than 5 minutes to get ready. Just brush your teeth and I will bring breakfast and teas up for you.”

No matter what I tried, the mornings have been ugly since we started Distant Learning in August. We could start the week with a good start; by Thursday, things would fall apart. Fridays are ugly, ugly mornings. Then Monday also gets infected with this ugly ugly morning disease. Did you noticed that I started this paragraph with “No matter what I tried.” I came to realized that it was all me. It was all my fault! Yes! I recognized that to build a stable house; I need a good and strong foundation (yes, I can finally apply my fancy architecture degree to something useful). To have a strong foundation, I would need all the hands around me to build it. And if we wanted “our” house to be strong and stable, we would need to have everyone living under the house to roll up their sleeves and help build it. It wasn’t just a house for me. It’s a house for us.

I stepped back and approached it differently. I asked myself if I were to be at work and if this was a problem at work, how would I solve it? If something like this happened in the classroom (when I was a substitute teacher), how would I approach it? I had to remove the word “family” from the problem and just looked at it as just a “problem” without the burden and baggage of “family” in it. It is a scheduling problem, after all, so how to best solve it?

Peaceful Morning Routine

POWERSHIFTS:

It is a scheduling problem. Who are the stakeholders: All four of, us because it affects our moods when the morning goes awry. Who needs to stick to this: All four of us. Who does this need to work for: All of us, but mostly my kids. This was a powerful realization because finally, I realized that even though it affects all four of us in the morning, this needs to work best for my kids. It must be a schedule that works for them. It must be their schedule and not a schedule I designed for them. They need to create the schedule for themselves. Who needs to own this: my kids with two supportive parents.

Yellow cards for tasks and pink cards for time. (1) Put the tasks in chronological order. (2) How much time for each task? (3) Work backward from 9:00 am back to figure out the time for the first task.

CREATIVE SOLUTIONS:

Morning Tasks/Steps: list out every step of the morning routine on a small card. What’s the Sequence: put these tasks in order of how they envision their morning would be from waking up… getting out of bed…right up until sitting down in front of their computer for their first class. Examples of tasks: Get out of bed, fold the blankets, change their clothes, pick the clothing off the floor, use the toilet, wash their hands, brush their teeth, wash their face, brush their hair, drink water, empty the dishwasher, prep and eat breakfast, clean up breakfast, get to class on time.

We went from 20 seconds to brush teeth to 1 minute.

3. How much time will it take to complete each task: for each morning step, ask how much time it will take to complete that task. Example: Brush teeth: how long will that take? My eldest son said 20 seconds and we all decided to give it 1 minute to have some cushion time. Change clothes: my kids decided that it would take them 3 minutes to change clothes but if they layout the clothes the night before, they would shave off 1 minute.

Shaving off 1 minute for changing clothes by picking and laying out clothes the night before.

4. Working Backward: So working backward from the first class — which starts at 9:00 am — minus minutes from each of their tasks to arrive at what time they would have to wake up and get out of bed. After we finished going through each task, assigning time for each, they were shocked that this all added up to a total of 54 minutes! Actually, it was surprising for all of us that it took almost an hour to run through our morning routine.

The boys picked this spot on their wall to put up the Peaceful Morning Routine. It’s the space in front of them between their two desks. This way it’s very visible and helps them to move along the schedule in the morning.

The first Monday that we applied this “Peaceful Morning Routine,” it went so smoothly that we all high-fived the kids before they ran up to class. It was so smooth and so peaceful. We all did our part to help out, and the kids knew exactly what they needed to do — and it was helpful to see the time they needed to complete their tasks. We used to post a checklist for morning routines, but I found that the most powerful shift was to attach a time to each of the routines and have the kids decide on the time it would take them to complete that task. Having the time next to the task helped the kids move along the schedule without us having to nag them to get onto the next task! If you are creating a schedule or a routine, a time factor must be attached to the schedule or a routine to make it work smoothly. So make sure you “take time” to “schedule time” for each task!

As we’re wrapping up our second week of applying this “Peaceful Morning Routine,” I find that the schedule would slip when we stayed up late, and it was harder to wake up in the morning. We needed to make sure that everyone was up. If I wanted my kids to be on this new schedule, I would still need to be there to help them move along — to be on schedule. On average, I read that it usually takes 2 months or more before a new behavior becomes a habit. The magic number is 66 days. We will also need to figure out what the Peaceful Morning Weekend schedule would look like, because there wasn’t a need to get to class on time, so what would be the motivation during the weekend for our kids to move along with a Peaceful Morning Routine.

So, as we’re wrapping up the end of our second week, our boys also wrapped up the first semester of Distant Learning. They will have 3 weeks’ breaks before starting Distant Learning again. I wonder what it will be like during the next 3 weeks, and how best to approach it, especially with the Christmas and New Year holidays. We will probably fall off schedule and will have some ugly, ugly mornings again. I just hope what we came up with will help a little, and I look forward to when the kids are back in “school” when we get to deploy our Peaceful Morning Routine for 66 days straight and look forward to it becoming an ingrained habit for all four of us.

I’m once again at my favorite spot at the dining table smelling a steaming cup of coffee, footsteps running away and up the staircase, my kids yelling back, “thanks for the Peace Offerings!” I smile knowing that they deserve the little reward, a delicious square piece of mint fudge cookie.