Get your shoes on.
Get your shoes on!!
GET!!! YOUR!!! SHOES!!! ON!!!!
Our mornings nearly always went something like that. The kids being poky. Not listening. Me repeating myself. Me eventually yelling.
Every. Single. Morning.
And the most shameful part? I realized it wasn’t the kids’ pokiness that was causing my yelling. It was me.
I took a hard look at why our mornings were frazzled and stressed and filled with raised voices.
The bad news? It was all my fault.
The good news? It was easy to change.
3 Rules for a Calmer Morning and Less Yelling
1. Ditch the phone
In my job, many of my teammates work at night and most of my customers shop at night, so that means I wake up to messages on my screen each morning.
It’s a constant pull. The feeling, the urgency that I need to get back to them.
Not to mention the pull to quickly scroll Facebook comments. And to quickly check my emails. And… and… and…
I was constantly flipping from phone screen to morning cereal back to phone screen to kids socks to phone screen…you get the idea.
My mind was bouncing all over the place, so I couldn’t keep my family on target in getting out the door, which led to me yelling.
Ditch the phone. Messages can wait an extra 30 minutes.
2. Turn off the TV
I looooove the morning news.
It’s an adult voice (which when you work at home with kids around, adult voices are like heaven) and it just feels good to know what’s going on in the rest of the world.
But, not only did I find myself distracted by it, my kids were too.
I was constantly having to remind them to eat their breakfast because, for some reason, whatever Savanah Guthrie on the Today Show was saying mesmerized my 6-year-old.
TV was one more thing taking us off target and causing me to lose my cool.
3. Wake the kids up just 15 minutes earlier
This was the hardest.
I worked for 8 years to get those babies to sleep, and now here I was waking them up!
I felt so guilty. They must tired. They look so peaceful.
But that guilt allowed me to push the wake up to the very last minute possible. Which in turn made us rush, which then made me, you guessed it, YELL.
So, even though I had to interrupt those sweet sleeping faces from their slumber at 7:15 instead of 7:30, I knew those few extra minutes would give us the freedom to be more relaxed and less rushed in the morning.
And lead to LESS yelling.
Hard, But Worth It
Those three things are simple, but they aren’t easy.
It’s hard when your phone is dinging at you and you want to get just one more to-do off your list.
It’s hard when your bed is so warm and you are tired. Those 15 minutes seem like a life raft.
But it’s also hard always starting every morning off amongst chaos with frayed nerves.
Implementing these three simple rules helped me stop the frenzy that led to the yelling.
Is every morning of ours now gloriously chaos free? Someday maybe I can say yes (when the kids are all in college).
But for now, they are a bit more calm and less anxious. And as a work-from-home mom of three, that’s glorious to me.
What are your tips for a calm morning routine? Tell us below!
Looking for more morning routine tips? Check out our post here!
