Routines, schedules and school lunches, OH MY!

Bre starts kindergarten on the 7th of September, just 18 short days away! *insert barely contained sobs*

Aside from trying to figure out how she got old enough to go to school in the first place, I have been thinking about getting her (and me) back into the routine of morning and bedtime schedules. Once summer time (FINALLY) hits MN I just can't bring myself to stick to any kind of a regular schedule, sleeping, waking or otherwise. It feels like cheating on the spontaneity of the season somehow. I LOVE to have last minute picnics or trips to the pool or BBQs at a friend's house or Dairy Queen treats and these types of things just don't seem to hold the same joy if they are planned out to far in advance. :-) However, this carefree, fly by the seat of my pants, lovable quality I posses does not lend itself very well to the need for my children to be fully rested and mentally capable at a much to early time (in my night owl opinion) of the am hours. So, as the far to short summer months of the north regretfully begin to come to a close, I realize once again that I must surrender a large portion of my party loving personality to the cold, hard, task master of set bedtime and morning routines for the sake of my daughter's academic success and physical well being.

Now, even though I do so love an impromptu get together (I think I must get this from my mother, people would always say "Sonja will throw a party at the drop of a hat...and she'll even drop the hat! lol) I also LOVE check lists and charts. I think I have come to love these organizational tools so dearly because they allow me to keep a lot of clutter out of my brain so I have more room for the creativity and productivity to come through. I can easily see (I am a super visual learner) what needs to be done next and when I get it done, I get the instant gratification of checking it off (I am also a very tactile learner). So, when I began thinking about how to help Bre and I get and stay on track with our much needed am & pm routines I decided that what we needed were some charts. :-)

I poked around online for already made charts that I could just print off, laminate and reuse, but I was not very happy with what I found. So, I decided to make my own. I had already made a list (I told you I love lists) of the things she would need to do for each of these separate routines. I let her sit with me at the computer and look at a free clip art website and choose which pictures she wanted for each of the individual tasks. For the most part, if the picture had purple on it, that was the one that she wanted. :-) Anyway, here is what I came up with:

Before School Chart

She hasn't seem them yet and I know she will love them because all afternoon while she and Wes were playing in the backyard I heard her talking to him about "the chart for school that Mommy made for me and I got to pick out the pictures!" We will print them off, laminate them and be able to use them all year long. Maybe this won't be so bad. :-)