Your alarm clock is the crying baby wanting to be fed. Before you can stumble out of bed to take care of the cries your toddler comes through your bedroom door wanting snuggles or begging for breakfast (it depends on the day.)
No matter what you do you can’t seem to get ahead and have a pleasant morning time with your little children. You want peace. And you crave structure. But what do you do?
This was me a few months ago. I would wake up to my children already under my feet, and the rest of the morning I would be rushing to get all the things I needed to get done finished before someone was needing a nap or insisting on a snack.
How was I going to handle this when we start homeschool soon? Or what about if we are blessed with another child one day? Would I ever be able to create a peaceful morning?
The one thing I did not what to do was get up before my kids. That’s what everyone suggests and I did try it a few times. But waking up throughout the night to feed my baby and then having my toddlers wake up anywhere from 5:00 to 6:00 every morning did not leave me a lot of margin for rest.
If that’s your season, great! But the rest of this post is going to be for the moms who can’t make waking up before their kids a reality.
You can still bring peace and structure into your mornings!
So what did I do? Well I wanted structure but not rigidity. I didn’t want our time to be so scheduled that I would just be stressed out everyday. But I did want my kids to know what to expect. So this is what I created.
I created simple rhythms that allow our morning time to flow smoothly but without any stress. And it brought so much peace.
Below I am explaining everything my kids and I do throughout the week to create peaceful, structured mornings. Let’s dive in!
Mornings are for stillness
I’m not going to lie. With three little boys this is definitely still a work in progress. But I want to instill the idea that our time in the morning should welcome peace into our day.
We can wake up and begin our day with quietness, slowness, and stillness. This is before the house truly gets going. Some are still sleeping. Others are quietly playing. It’s the best way to open the door to a new day.
Our morning 3s
Before we have breakfast everyone needs to complete their morning three. These are three nonnegotiables that we each have to get ready for the day. Depending on what season of life you are in this may look the same or different for each of your children.
Here are some examples:
get dressed for the day, make their bed, brush their teeth
tidy their room, get dressed, pack their backpack
get ready for the day, have coffee, get morning sun (mom needs a morning 3 too!)
Talk with your kids and decide what everyone’s morning 3 is going to be. Then require those to be completed before anyone can come to breakfast.
Simplify breakfast
I am not in the season of life where I can start cooking in the kitchen first thing in the morning. Everyone would be too hungry and grumpy waiting on breakfast to be finished. But I still want to make good food for us to start our day.
So this means I will prepare breakfast ahead of time so we have something to heat up quickly, make a smoothie that is packed with protein, or just whip up something simple like eggs and toast.
Bible time
This has been the game changer for our mornings. Reading the Bible is something I want my children to be used to and something that we begin our day with. And this is the best time for us to do it right now.
After breakfast is done I will read a chapter or two to my kids as they play with something like blocks or cars.
They are still young. I do not expect this time to be completely silent and them always to be focused. We will get there. But even now they are absorbing so much of God’s Word.
Chores
This is a newer thing that we added to our morning time but I believe it is so necessary. I want our kids to work as a team in this home and put effort into this space because they live here too.
Since my kids are young they don’t have much to do and I will switch up the chore I assign each of them every week so they learn many different skills. Some examples could be clearing the breakfast dishes, helping empty the dishwasher, bringing their laundry to be washed, loading the washing machine, tidying shoes, mopping, or wiping down the table.
This is the time I will do my housework too. We are all working together. And when they finish they can go play for a while until I am usually finished with the work I have to do.
Lesson time/Homeschool
This would totally be dependent on your family and what you want to do as the mom, but my kids love learning. And I love teaching them. So we will do lessons for anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour at least four days a week. I keep it simple with just the basics or Bible lessons.
Another reason I added this to our morning schedule is because I wanted to make this time of learning familiar for when we begin homeschool. And so I would already be used to working this into my daily schedule.
But again, this probably isn’t for everybody.
Snack time
So I started scheduling two snack times into our days for one reason. And that was to teach my children self control in everything.
Sometimes they were just bored. But most of the time they would ask for snacks literally two minutes after finishing breakfast. Like in other areas of life we need to teach our kids to use self control, to control our needs and desires (our flesh.) So we created a snack time.
If they get hungry they have to wait until it is time for snacks. Depending on the day this happens during or after our lesson time.
And that is how we keep peace and structure in our mornings.
There is still a lot of time for play or running errands or wiggle room for those rough days, because those definitely come in this stage of life. But having this structured routine makes our mornings so much smoother. We work together. I am more at peace and am able to mother well.
This is the schedule we use each morning! Everything is pictures so it’s easy to use with littles! DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE
If you try implementing any of this into your mornings let me know if it helped create structure for your home. And let me know if you want to read a detailed rundown of our afternoon/evening rhythms. It’s a beautiful continuation of the same structure to get us ready to end the day!
