Build Routines

Happy TWENTY TEN to all of you! I hope this new year is exactly what you want it to be. I want to start this off by telling all of you lovely readers out there how much it means to me that you read this blog. December 29 was the one year anniversary of this project! I am pretty proud of that fact. It makes me so happy to put my thoughts, passions, fears, and personality out there and I appreciate your support and readership so much. I plan to continue developing this site and hope to unveil some improvements shortly. So, please stay tuned. And I don't think I say this enough...please feel free to make comments, queries, and pointers on any and everything I write about. I love to hear from you and would love this place to feel more like a meeting of the minds. So comment away if you are so inclined! And thanks again for making this so worth it for me.

With the new year fresh as the morning dew, like most, I have fresh starts and goals on the mind. I really do love a good resolution and this year one of mine is to create better routines for me personally and for my family. I came across this phrase "building routines" somewhere awhile back and have had it scrawled on our chalkboard for months. I realize that I am drawn to the phrase because of the inherent implication that a routine has to start from zilch and grow into something more, establish itself as it were. You can't make new habits materialize and work out of thin air. And yet this is the approach I normally go for...I try to force very specific changes and want them to happen overnight. My family has braved all kinds of iterations of my good intentions relating to our tv watching habits, creative aspirations, chores, exercise plans, and reading. The best laid plans...but somehow everything disintegrates fairly quickly and I'm back to my free form sense of each day where pretty much what happens just does. I tend to be pretty laissez faire about life, and since Jaren's schedule being self employed is super flexible, our weeks look really different from one to the next. Sometimes we're all home on Wednesday and stay in our PJs until 12:00 and sometimes Jaren is out of town and I get the urge to be up and at 'em by 9:00. It just depends, and there isn't much rhyme or reason to it. I think Cleo's school schedule is the most rigid thing in our life. Isn't that funny?

Lately this lack of repetitive routine has been bugging me. Maybe I crave more structure because of the semblance of control it brings to life. But I also think my family would benefit from something they could recognize as a standard course of events. (To hear kid pros tell it, children thrive on routine, right?) I like to think about milking everything I can out of each day in terms of enjoyment but also in terms of learning and productivity. I always have a lot of to do's floating around in my head and some fall into the honest to goodness chore or must do category, but a lot fall into that nebulous personal fulfillment area. I want to make time in my life for things like reading a good book and creating something with my own two hands. I want to be sure that my kids get to hear us read stories aloud to them each and every day. I want to spend time outdoors, regardless of the season. I would love to listen to a podcast of This American LIfe every Sunday with Jaren over our morning coffee. I could call each of these items goals, but what I actually would like them to be is just part of my life.

And this, I realize is the key clincher when thinking about building a routine. I think I may have been looking at it all wrong all these years, highlighting what I should do instead of what I want to do. What do I want each week I live to include? What balance do I want to strike? What do I want my kids' days to be filled with? Asking myself these questions rather than mumbling dishearteningly "I should be reading more", "I should be exercising daily" etc. etc. has really helped me isolate the routine I want to build. And true to my, and my family's laissez faire nature, I think I've hit on a format that can still resemble a routine without being too stringent and inflexible for our oh so flexible lifestyle. I don't have to assign a day or a set time to each thing, just a goal to hit each one at least once during the week with a very basic category check off list.

Here's how I envision it working: basically I've broken the routine down into the different elements I want to include within each week. They are: create, educate, clean, exercise, organize, entertain. Each category functions on two levels, one personal and the other family. For example each week, I want to create something and I want my kids to do this as well. We can craft, write a story, take photos, draw, that kind of thing. For clean, I have to do the normal household cleaning but I want to make sure my kids get in the habit of doing cleaning chores that effect their immediate surroundings as well. Educate will hopefully ensure that I spend adequate time reading this year and exposing myself to new info via print, podcast or computer. And the same thing for my family. Organize is the umbrella term for tackling household and personal things like sorting my iphoto, going through my massive magazine clipping stash, restacking the linen closet, going through all the tiny baby clothes that have no business being in Flynn's closet anymore--pretty much all the things I put off because I never assign myself a moment to do them. Exercise is self explanatory, though including the kids on this one is important to me because, especially in the winter, we don't always move, move, move as much as we should. Entertain is the purely fun one. This includes time with friends, tv and movie watching, and random social and family activities out and about.

If we manage to actually do something in all those areas at least once a week I think I'm looking at a pretty balanced, good life. I think its the life I want to lead, and if being a little type A about it helps me get there then I'm willing to try it. So don't make fun of me. And fingers crossed, if it works (and I will report back in a few weeks on our progress) you may just want to give it your own little mini type A whirl.