Managing Morning Madness – Trouble Spots

Welcome back to the final installment of Managing Morning Madness!  Today’s tips are somewhat subjective, so I’ll give a couple examples but you’ll want to target your own trouble spot and come up with a solution that works!

Target Your Trouble Spot

Chances are, your mornings are not chaotic all over the board, but the problem can be traced down to one or two key trouble spots. Think about what it is that you never seem to get to do or the area that always pushes you behind schedule and work on it.  Don’t try to apply all of my tips at once; work on one at a time.  You’ll be more successful this way and less likely to be overwhelmed with a bunch of changes all at once.  I also suggest starting with something that can be easily fixed.  By starting “small” you’ll have success sooner, which will motivate you to tackle the next problem.

I’ve mentioned in a previous blog that shoes were a trouble spot for us and I explained how I handled it.  Another example comes from a friend of mine.  Her nemesis was her daughter’s hair.  She couldn’t seem to make it out of the house with her daughter’s hair fixed.  Her daughter has one of those heads of hair that needs to be brushed or fixed, she’s got so much of it!

My friend finally learned that unless she fixed her daughter’s hair before they came downstairs for breakfast, it didn’t get done. So she developed the habit of fixing her daughter’s hair first thing in the morning. By getting it in braids, a pony tail, or a barrette, she had it done and out of the way. Then, later in the morning, when her daughter got herself dressed, my friend didn’t have to remember to go do her daughter’s hair and when they left the house, she didn’t take a “wild child” with her.

There’s another simple solution to this same problem: keep a brush in the car.  Then you can always brush it when you get where you’re going.

So you see from these two examples (the shoes and the hair), there are multiple ways to address your trouble spot.  Think “outside the box” about solutions to your trouble spot and an idea will come to you. Try something for a few weeks and see if it makes a difference. Either you’ll have your problem solved or you’ll know that you need to try a new approach.

When the Trouble Isn’t a Task

As I talked to a few other parents, I discovered two common trouble spots that weren’t “tasks” to be completed, but much bigger issues:

• Motivating a Child to Get Ready (also known as the dawdling child)
• Abnormal Days/Change of Daily Routine (that one or two days a week when your schedule isn’t normal and you’re required to be out of the house earlier than normal)

Motivating a dawdling child is a HUGE topic and one I won’t cover here in Morning Madness. I’ll post a blog with some ideas for dawdling children in a few weeks, so check back.  But as for the problem of needing to be out of the house earlier than normal, if you slowly start to apply the steps I’ve written about in these four blogs on “Managing Morning Madness,” hopefully those “abnormal days” won’t set you back.  If you plan ahead, pack the night before, have a nutritional breakfast ready for in the car and  get your kids trained to be involved in the morning routines, you should haven’t any trouble being out the door earlier than normal…with the exception of possibly having to set the alarm a little earlier and get out of bed sooner.  But you’re on your own for that discipline!

-posted by Donna Venning, who  felt that her stress to get out the door was starting to come out in erratic driving, so she developed her morning habits so that she can leave her house in a calm, peaceful, pleasant manner, making her a safer, nicer driver!