Mommy's morning helper

Our weekday mornings tend to be a little hectic. If you have kids, there's no doubt in my mind, that your's are too. I've read numerous articles in all the parenting magazines on how to make the morning an easy effortless ride. I have no idea why I've never really made an attempt to put any of the wonderful ideas contained within those articles into practice. Maybe I liked yelling and getting all crazy in the morning. This year though, I finally stopped reading about how to make a difference and did something about it.

I bought us one of these dry erase boards...this one is set up for chores but I use it for the list of morning "jobs" rather than a chore chart. I wrote in all the little things that the kids need to do each morning before the bus comes and assigned each child his/her own color of star. When they've completed one of the jobs, they move a star into the square in the appropriate day colomn. All the squares need to be filled by eight a.m. Voila! That was it. I didn't invent this. I've read about countless variations of this idea over the years. And can I just tell you how much easier our mornings have become? They are delightful! No longer am I hollering at Sam to get dressed, eat breakfast, put your underwear in the hamper!!! No longer do I wonder whose plate is still sitting on the table. No longer do I need to ask if their library book is in their bags on library day. No longer do I need to say "go brush your teeth" ten trillion times each morning. All it takes now is an occasional "Did you check the list?" and it all gets done! It's like magic! Teresa is an especially big fan of the list and rarely do I need to direct a "did you check the list?" to her but even Sam, my pokey "I want to go back to bed" guy has responded really well to this. Although, in true Sam fashion, he has tried to get around the system by moving his stars into every square in the column before doing any of it. He realized that didn't pay off when he had to race to get dressed as the bus waited out front.

I honestly don't know why I waited so many years to try anything to make my mornings easier. But I am soooooooo happy I stopped whining about my horrible mornings and actually did something to make them less hectic.