Second Verse, Not Same as the First

As a follow-up to my last post of Swaddled Sweetness, our mornings have not gotten any better.

When the weekend finally arrives, we are not the kind of family to sit around the house to rest and relax after a taxing work week. In fact, it’s been 2 months since we moved into our new house and we still have a garage full of boxes that haven’t been unpacked. Who has time with so many fun things to do, places to explore, and new friends to meet!

This past weekend we had friends visit from Maryland. They left Sunday morning and we met some new friends here in Tampa. A friend of Ed’s from high school lives in Tampa now too, so he had a bunch of people over to watch football on Sunday. We met some really fun people.

On Monday morning though, we paid for our busy, hectic, super fun weekend. Everyone overslept. Our morning was more hectic than normal. Everyone was tired, and therefore cranky. Isabelle and I had one of our typical morning knock-down drag-out fights. It was a doozie too. I was yelling at her to get dressed, get her shoes on, brush her teeth, brush her hair, eat her breakfast, no she couldn’t watch a cartoon, we had to leave, we were late, ackkkkkk!

At the same time, I was running around trying to get dressed, brushed, etc.

So Monday night, we had a sit down to talk about our morning routine. Isabelle and I agreed that Monday morning was NOT very fun. It made us angry and sad that we got into such a bad fight. So we agreed that we had to do things differently. Our new routine as we laid it out Monday night:

• Isabelle’s Princess Alarm Clock will go off at 7:30 AM. If she wants to watch a cartoon that morning, then she has to wake up at that alarm time.

• She has been taught how to turn on the TV and access her recorded cartoons so she can pick what she wants to watch.

• After that one cartoon is over, she has to come wake me up (I’m usually up by this point anyway, but if I’m still hitting the snooze button, she is supposed to come rile me awake at 8:00 AM)

• At 8AM, we eat breakfast together. We have 30 minutes for breakfast so we set the timer for 20 minutes to remind us it’s time to finish up so we have time to get dressed.

• No later than 8:30AM, we each go get ourselves dressed and put our shoes on (quickly…NO playing in our room).

• Then we brush our teeth and hair.

• We should be leaving the house by 8:50AM at the latest to get to school on time.

We worked on a poster together, drew pictures for each step in our routine, talked about what happens if we miss any step in our routine (like we have to give up the one cartoon if we don't get up when the alarm goes off, or Mommy will have to pick out her outfit and get her dressed if we're behind schedule, etc.)

Fingers crossed we're on a path to a more civilized morning and maybe those few extra moments we save can be used for more swaddled sweetness.

This morning, we got through the last step of brushing and it was only about 8:40AM. I asked Isabelle if she wanted to read a book before we left since we had some spare time. She was totally shocked and thought I was joking. You mean here? At the house? Right now? Read a book???

And that's exactly what we did. We cuddled on the couch for 10 whole minutes and read a book that we haven't read in a while. It was an awesome way to send her off to school and start my workday.