Morning has broken, but it can be fixed!

I am very lucky that mornings around here are usually pretty laid-back affairs. While we almost always have something going on in the morning; an activity or an errand (or three!) to run, I have purposely scheduled these so that they are later in the morning and rarely require us to dash out the door at inhumane times of the day.

Our mornings typically go something like this:

5:30 am: Mike's alarm goes off. He gets up and gets ready to go to work (he's working early-ish hours this summer so we don't feel as though we are falling quite as far behind on the summer-related house projects).

6:30 am: Mike kisses me goodbye and leaves for work. I try to hoist my bones out of bed at this time and get my shower taken while the girls are still sleeping. The success of this depends on the number of times I was out of bed dealing with kids in the night.

7 - 8 am: The girls awaken. Emily has been leaning towards the earlier end of this spectrum, recently getting up as early as 6:30 or 6:45. I lay out her clothes, give her medicine and set her up with a Pop-Tart and milk in front of a Wiggles video. If I haven't showered yet, this is when I grab my shower. Lucy tends to get up more towards 8 or 8:30. I get her up, dress her, give her medicine, give her a bottle and feed her some cereal.

8:45 - 10:30 am: Somewhere in here we will leave for whatever activity we have scheduled. We're about 20-30 minutes from just about anywhere we need to be, and I hate being late, so I try to build in a cushion of time to ensure that we aren't running in the door at the last minute.

As I said, I am very lucky that I am at home with my kids. I don't have to try to push everyone out the door by 6:30 so that we can do a day-care drop-off and get to work before 8 am. My morning schedule has gotten significantly easier now that Emily is old enough to take care of a fair portion of her morning routine on her own. She dresses herself (well, not all the time, but she knows how) and will sit happily at the table in the living room to eat her breakfast while I wander around doing other stuff.

The thing that has helped me the most is getting up before the kids do so that I can get my shower and personal care stuff done. When Emily was very little, I would stay in bed until she woke up for the day, but then I had to figure out what to do with her while I took my shower (of course, I was a paranoid first-time mom who didn't want to leave her alone. I got over that eventually). And I do NOT function until I have had a shower. Just does not happen.

This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a contest sponsored by KRAFT BAGEL-FULS.