Morning Routines for Moms: Can it be done?
I hear TONS of people (or is it just a few people over and over?) talk about morning routines and how important they are to having a productive day, blah blah blah. It sounds SO GREAT I've made MANY, MANY attempts to have one of my own - something that allows me to step into a new day with intention, having paid a little bit of attention to myself so I don't feel robbed and utterly depleted by the end of the day.
The thing is though, that all of these people who talk of having glorious 1-2 hour routines where they exercise, read, write, walk for five miles, or whatever, don't have little kids. As much as I'd like to have a morning routine, I'm just about ready to give up on one because I'm either too tired to get up before the kids, or if I do get up, the kids wake up earlier than usual and if they're awake, forget about it.
The words routine and kids don't always fit nicely in the same sentence.
It's possible that the routines I've tried in the past were unrealistic. Maybe I wanted to do too much. Maybe I need to lower my expectations for what can be accomplished in a morning routine at this time in my life. So I've decided that instead of having a rigid set of actions, it'd be better to choose a few things I'd like to do and prioritize them so that if my morning got cut short, at least I made time for the most important things.
My ideal morning would have the following:
- Prayer/meditation
- Reading
- Writing
- Exercise (or some kind of movement)
If I could do it all, GREAT. But if all I got around to doing before Leo wakes up was meditating for 5 minutes, I would just call it good and be grateful that I had five minutes to do something for myself. I've accepted that my life doesn't look like the lives of many of the folks I look up to and read about with their zen-like morning routines, and that's ok, because I wake up to two beautiful faces who absolutely light up when they see me, who make their first ten minutes the most radiant part of my day - even if it does disintegrate into poopy diapers, spit up and oat meal rubbed into the couch.
Moms - have you managed a decent morning routine? HOW do you do it?