Our Family Daybook

{Ok, so I deleted Disqus off of my blog at least for the time being, because it is having major problems posting your comments...Just wanted to let you guys know that.  So be a dear and comment on this post just so I know everything is working right now in that area....Thanks!}

So, I've been nesting ALL SUMMER...cleaned the basement, purged toys, back-to-school shopped (I've even Christmas-shopped!!), painted rooms, organized kitchen cabinets...and still my house is somewhat of a mess...go figure!

However, I have managed to institute schedules and organizational solutions to some of the "bottleneck" times of our day.  Two of those times are bedtime and morning.

I realized that bedtime had become too routinely a time of a lot of frustration and raised voices and craziness and last-minute requests.  And a lot of Mom and Dad reminding everyone verbally what is to be done next.

In her book, Walking Into a Hug, Janene Ustach mentions that bedtime should be a "blessed time."  And I wanted our bedtimes to become more of a peaceful, happy time...a time to connect with my kids and to reassure them, not just a time to rush and hush!  Same deal in the morning...I wanted to send them off to school with love and hugs, not reprimands!

Since I was already making a simple after school chore chart for the kids, I also made a bedtime/wake-up time "road map" to help our little ones VISUALIZE what bedtime should look like in our house.  

It evolved into Our Family Daybook, and it looks like this:  

Since I've got mostly pre-readers, I just used images off of a Google image search...I tried to find the happiest looking images so that my kids could start to internalize that this was not just a "to do list", but a time to wind down and to embrace.  

I want them to understand that when we all do the little things we are responsible for, it leaves us time for extra "fun with Mom" before school and "hugs with Dad" before bed, etc.

So far, it's working.

This is our after school chore rotation.

(Who knows, maybe MMM will mass-produce this for his MMM Marketplace??  ;)

One night before bed, I saw Autumn, my three-year-old, carefully studying the "bedtime" map.

She never forgets to carry her basket upstairs, which is number one on the list.  That was another thing I instituted.  

I was getting tired of personal items piling up on the landing of the steps.  It's a hazard, and I am just no longer able to get it all upstairs every night!  So, I bought the kids these baskets with handles at Walmart.  Throughout the day as we tidy up, I put their items in their respective baskets, or they do.  Every night, they carry their own baskets upstairs and put their stuff away.  No more overwhelming piles of who-knows-what on the steps for mommy to deal with!  Yay!

Then I was reminded of CaMarie Hoffman's post from last year's Family Proclamation Celebration about Reaching Your Family's Potential.  She talked about how they create posters of their family goals using pictures they cut out of magazines, and they post it where they can look at it often.  It helps them to visualize what they want their lives to look like...and achieve it!

So what do you do as part of your daily routine to make things more lovely when they can easily get hectic?  Do tell!

PS - You can still enter this week's giveaway...just go to this post and give me your name suggestions!  I will announce the winner of the Gospel Chicks prints tomorrow!