Okay, so I should probably post with stories and pictures from our week up north with my parents, but I don’t have the pictures on my computer yet. Maybe later I’ll get there.
Instead, since it’s on my mind, I’ll share some recent attempts to make life go a little more smoothly. While on vacation, I read/skimmed the book Simplicity Parenting. While overall, I feel we do a pretty good job in most of the areas described in the book, there’s always room for improvement. I jotted down several ideas, discussed them with Don, and this week we started implementing some of them. While we haven’t been at them long enough for them to have become habits, so far they’re going well. Here’s what we’ve started:
- Peter is now responsible for setting the table before dinner. Today, he actually did it without protesting.
- Everyone now helps clear the table after dinner (instead of just me).
- Peter must pick up all of his toys/stuff that is outside of his bedroom and return it to his bedroom in the evening; I won’t read to him before bed until this is done. (We used to do this before we moved, but we lost the habit a few months ago.)
- I set up a pattern for weekly meals to simplify meal planning. For example, Monday is pizza night and Tuesday is pasta night. It might be store-bought pizza or homemade pizza, spaghetti with tomato sauce or fettuccine with pesto sauce, so there’s both flexibility and some structure to work with.
- We now have a 20 minute quiet reading time after lunch. This is working very well. Peter enjoys looking at pictures in books and can read more and more things independently, so he can easily occupy himself for that long. I’m appreciating having the chance to do some reading myself. I used to never read during the day, then I would often be so tired after Peter was in bed that I didn’t want to read anything intelligent. Plus, I’m setting a good example by letting him see me reading.
- Peter is now eating his “night breakfast” (snack before bed) by candlelight. It provides a soothing ambiance to help him settle down before bed.
I find that having good routines and habits makes life go much more smoothly. In fact, the consistency of our routines was one of the areas that our homestudy social worker was very impressed with, and D certainly did appreciate and benefit from them.
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