Saturday, November 17, 2012

break in routine

Well lest you think it's all rainbows and unicorns over here... it is not. I mean sure things are really great in a lot of ways, but there is this one thing..... my kids. Oh God love them, they have been a handful lately. Every night it's the same thing... fighting, arguing and complaining over doing homework, tidying up, clearing the table... you know usual everyday life kind of shit and I am so so so over it. Maya is actually the biggest thorn in my side, Abby is a great little helper, but she gets tired of doing everything all of the time and that's where she starts whining. I don't blame her, but even still.... not what I want to listen to.

There was been an increase in the yelling around here, mostly from me. I'm tired of that too. It's not effective in any way, shape, or form, but I find myself resorting to that more and more. Enough. We had a talk, over dinner one night about what we could all do to make things go smoother and nobody had any real answers, but I managed to come up with something anyway.

When the kids get off the bus I am waiting for them. I have a snack ready to go and I am checking my email at the kitchen table. I check their bags for notes, check Abby's teacher's website for homework and they get started on their homework, if they have no assigned homework, then they read at the table and have their snacks. All that taken care of it's on to tidying while I get dinner started. The expectation is all of this is done before they get to do anything else like TV, computer, toys, friends etc.

So far it's working out pretty good. By the end of the week, the kids had fallen right into the routine and needed no prompting to get to the table and get going. There has been a steady decrease in (my) yelling and this is likely the longest the house has remained "tidy", a term I am using loosely here.

But...... But.....

I did not get a chance to run at all this week. Typically I run as soon as I get home from work, before the kids get off the bus. By the time I get back they've been home 30 minutes and at that point I've lost them. So it was a great week for the family and Shanny the Mom, maybe not so great for Shanny the runner. My hope is now that we have a routine established, Mike will be able to step in and over see homework on my run days.

So, a week with no running... don't get me wrong, the break was nice. Especially with the colder weather here, but it was too easy to skip and that makes me nervous. It's taken me a long time to get to here and I can see how easy it is to get off track and it's scary. So here's hoping for a better week. A week with less yelling and more running.

1 comment:

Lynn said...

We have had a similar fall around here - lots of low level bickering, whining, and complaining, nothing out of the ordinary at all but for some reason, it's been accumulating in the family system and that's led to quite a bit of yelling. GAH.

I also gave up a lot of personal type activities to try to straighten things out, and it is working just to have me more present and enforcing the schedule, but yeah - there goes the me time. Guess they mean it when they say you can't have it all.