Calm the Morning Chaos with Reliable Rhythms

“…Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head…”

The Beatles, A Day In The Life

Let’s get practical!  What better place to start than exploring what can help calm the morning chaos? 🙃 We are going to explore three specific desires we had surrounding our morning get-to-school routine. And then, how we worked backwards from a problem or a passion to create rhythms that have made a big difference for our family! 

1. Start your morning on purpose (before you see your kids, if it’s a reasonable time 🤪)

The Problem/Passion: I (Brianna) felt pulled in too many directions in the morning.  Getting myself ready, making school lunch, doing the girls’ hair, pouring cereal, cleaning up spills, getting Archer dressed, packing snacks for the day, brushing all the teeth, gathering library books, putting on sunscreen and hats, or toques and mittens … I probably don’t need to spell it out, you know how ‘get-out-the-door’ mornings can look! With all this happening at the same time, I couldn’t give the kids the focus and attention I wanted to. The morning is important! It sets the tone for our day and our kids’ day, and this led me to my why. I wanted to be present, calm and collected. 

The Rhythm:  Committing to being ready for the day before my girls come upstairs at 7:00am was something I wanted to try.  I had to tap into my inner early bird (buried deep…) and firm up my “get up” time.  I bought a simple (vintage looking 👌🏼) analog clock for my bedside table so I can keep my phone across the room on the dresser. When my alarm goes off, I have to get up to turn it off – no more “snoozing” for me! When I start the day ready before I say good morning to my kids, I feel like I’m starting my day on purpose. Things go much more smoothly.  (By the way, this is only sustainable with an effective night time routine – more to come on this in the future!)    

2. Start the day with a calm, clean work space in the kitchen

The Problem/Passion: The kitchen counter was cluttered from the previous night, which made breakfast and morning lunch-making chaotic.  Also, every morning, our dishwasher was full of clean dishes from the night before. This sounds good until you realize you can’t load any newly dirty dishes into it. This causes a domino effect across the sink and countertops!  Instead, I wanted to have clear surfaces and a ready-to-load dishwasher when facing the new day’s breakfast explosion!   

The Rhythm: In order to have an empty dishwasher waiting in the morning, we have committed to emptying the dishwasher the night before. This happens right before we head to our room to get ready for bed. In order to pull this off, we load and start the dishwasher right after supper every night. This way it’s ready to unload by bedtime.  While emptying the dishwasher is never something we feel like doing at that time of night, the “why” (more on the importance of this here ) is significant enough for our family to make it a non-negotiable.  It’s one less decision to make because we’ve committed to do it every night.  And a bonus we discovered –  because we do it together, it’s become a time that we debrief about our days and connect with one another without kids around! 

3. Establish a clear and consistent morning “order of operations”

The Problem/Passion:  Even though each morning consists of essentially the exact same “to-do’s,” our mornings felt flustered and full of negotiations.  We had kids doing inconsistent things, at inconsistent times, which leads to more distraction.  We wanted to streamline the process to help everyone stay more focused and on track.

The Rhythm: We have established with our kids the clear “order-of-operations” we had hoped might help us, and it has! It took time (and for a while we used a physical chart), but with consistency, the kids have learned the order in which we move through our morning. Rather than connecting each task with a time, orient each task around what comes before and what comes after. One day I was about to pour my daughter her cereal and she said “oh mom, you forgot, hair first!.” She was right, we do hair before breakfast – So, we stopped what we were doing and got back on track. Instead of constant reminders (“time to get dressed” or “time to brush your teeth,”), we refer to the “order-of-operations. We say something like “ok, teeth are brushed, what comes next?” and because it’s consistent, the kids know the answer and can move towards the next part of the rhythm. 

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Life still happens, embrace it all

Even with the most helpful rhythms in place, life still happens. We won’t always be able to calm the morning chaos. There are catastrophic spills that require a full outfit change, untimely and lengthy potty sessions, and crucial missing items (a certain stuffie, a specific sock, or a special rock) that we absolutely cannot leave the house without)!  These random or one-off moments will continue to happen throughout our lives and that’s ok. 🙂 Our hope is that a few more good rhythms will create a few more good moments – And it’s in these day-to-day, mundane moments that we influence the home and family culture that are shaping our kids.

Encouragement

These are some examples of rhythms that are helping our family calm our morning chaos. The ones that help your family will look different – It’s not the specifics, but the principles, that can be applied to every home and family situation! Work backwards from the problem or passion to create reliable rhythms that serve your family and help create more peace.

What is one small, consistent change you can make that would make a difference in the morning? What are a few things you want to do every morning in the same order?

Brianna and Ben