Navigating Chaotic Mornings with Kids

Hey, my name is Teresa Hildebrand and this is Organized Chaos. We take a deep dive into living with intentionality, focusing on what's important in our lives so we can truly feel our best. It may feel chaotic at times, but with a little organization, the right mindset and a ton of self-love, we can still thrive. Join me as we talk to other busy moms and experts who will share tips and strategies to help you reach your goals. Hope you enjoy this episode of Organized Chaos. Now on to the show. Hey friends, welcome to another episode of Organized Chaos. So today we're actually going to be talking about how to navigate chaotic mornings with kids. Yeah, and it really depends on what age your kids are and the level of chaoticness. Is that a word, chaoticness, the level of chaos that you might have? So I want to talk about this because I feel like I can share a maybe not a strategy, but just like a way of reframing how these mornings go and how that's helped me with coordinating the all the stuff that's happening, but also really kind of managing my stress level, because depending on how my day is going to start off is an indication of how it's going to go the rest of the day. But have you ever had those mornings when it just feels like time is playing tricks on you and your kids just seem to be operating in a universal or seconds stretch into eternity? Yep, that is usually how my mornings would go and I want to share kind of like a glimpse into my chaos and how I'm reframing it. So I want to have you picture this, so like I'm orchestrating kind of like this morning symphony right of getting the kids ready for school. My kids are a little bit older but somehow they really have to have that push every time to just do the basic things, so brushing teeth, changing their clothes and even eating breakfast, you know, like the basic stuff. It just sometimes feels like a marathon and my patience always worse than because I feel like man, why aren't they listening right, and that's part of the problem. It's that question, but I'll come back to that. I just want to continue the picture of this chaotic morning. So I find my son like cocooned in his like burrito blanket yeah, that's a thing, it's like this giant tortilla blanket, but he calls it the burrito blanket and I just feel frustrated because I'm like really, you're really doing this right now and you know I raise my voice, and I'm trying to kind of impart this urgency of the ticking clock, because it always feels like we're running against the clock. But here's the thing it's not really about the clock at all. It's that nagging feeling of disrespect. I ask them to do something, and it feels like it goes in one ear and out the other, and I know some of you may be shaking your head right now in agreement, so I'm going to jump right in and tell you that what's really helped me is realizing that I can't control their every move. There's like no magic formula that makes them instant listeners. The real struggle, though, is thinking that this made me a bad mom. It doesn't right. It doesn't make any of us a bad mom, it just makes us human. And you see, control is a tricky game, and in this case, it's not about controlling them, but kind of reframing my own thoughts. Once I made peace with that, I started to find more creative ways to make morning smoother, but and it's a big but even when they're not smooth, I found ways to see it in a different way and show up as a mom I want to be. So one of the things I wanna share with you is the reframing part and I kept thinking and kept asking myself questions like why aren't they listening? Why are they doing this? Why are they wasting my time? And those questions really weren't going to result in a good answer. So, rather than me asking myself those questions and really kind of making it mean something about me, I had to shift my thoughts and find a more proactive approach to the whole thing. So, rather than me in the moment thinking why are they doing this I mean, we've had so many mornings, this is should have been more of a learning experience for me and thinking, okay, I know this is gonna happen, this is a pattern that they have. So how do I make the correction beforehand? How do I make things easier for myself and also not make it about me? It's not that they're disrespecting me and it's not that they're doing this on purpose. They're just kids. So I have to kind of think of ways to make it smoother for us, and once I kind of reframed my thoughts around that it actually allowed me to have more brain space to think of those creative things. Because when you're always thinking about like this is okay, I like why are they doing this to me? I'm a bad mom and sometimes it's not really. You're not consciously thinking that you're a bad mom, but it is in the back of your mind because you feel like, well, if I was a good mom, they would listen to me, or something like that. But by allowing myself to kind of let that go, I freed up some space to think of things that would actually help us in the morning. So the big thing for us was to kind of prepare things beforehand and really prepping the night before. So whether it was lunches or clothes, shoes I mean anything that I can make things available to me without me having to think about it and not having the kids have to think about it, that really helped, because you're kind of taking away a step where you feel like there is a ticking clock and there's like time is of the essence. So if you're not having to go around looking for shoes or whatever, then it just makes things easier. Now, that's just one thing. Although I want to believe that my kids are more independent than they really are at this age, I have to understand that it really depends on the day, so there may be times where I'm gonna be required to do more than I want to, but it doesn't always have to follow me because my husband is here. So we can tag team and we will do that where beforehand we'll like designate a specific morning responsibility for each other so that we can split the load, and sometimes he can do it or sometimes I can do it, depending on what we have going on. But it does help minimize kind of the chaos by avoiding overlaps and making sure that the morning has kind of like this flow. So I'm super curious how do your mornings go and do you have any like funny stories? When it comes to morning routine and trying to deal with kids, you are not alone. Like this is obviously a common thing, but we can make some tweaks here and there to actually make it better for us All. Right, I hope that was helpful and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day and I'll see you next week. Bring our children something. Come live with us.