Mornings!

Wow, I’m just hanging around my house right now. The kid is in bed, my husband is playing baseball, and I’m…not at work. This doesn’t happen often since May when I started working evenings. This oddity in my schedule gives me some time to think about my schedule in general.

Since I work evenings, it’s hard to get to bed early. Then, I don’t get up much before my kid, when I have several things to do that just work better without a one-year-old tagging along. She takes a solid chunk of time to eat when she first gets up, while I lose my morning mojo. In the morning rush, my breakfast often gets shorted, which leads me to eat terrible lunches. My low-priority tasks too often get pushed to the next week.

There’s the nastiness of my current schedule, but there are some good things I’d like to keep. I’m getting pretty consistent about running, the house is pretty clean, and I’m snagging some good times with my daughter and husband. Our backyard has been getting a lot of use the last couple months!

Here are some things I’m attempting to improve my schedule:

• Going to bed right away when I get home from work. I was in the pattern of getting home, thinking I’d stay up for half an hour before going to bed, and then two hours later I’d still be watching cat videos on YouTube*. I wasn’t accomplishing anything worthwhile after work, so I’m moving that time to mornings, when I might be productive.
• Getting up at the same time every morning. This one is tough right now, but it should get easier when I start my 7am daily fitness class in a couple of weeks. Having other people involved gets me out of bed pretty reliably.
• Eating a good breakfast. This is tough, since I’m kinda sick of most breakfast food right now. Eggs and oatmeal are all on the down cycles, although yogurt is still running strong.
• Teaching my kid to sleep later. This is actually going okay. She is just ditching her second nap, so we’re trying to put the extra sleep in the morning.

Conveniently, Money Saving Mom has been working on the same general topic lately, which I just discovered yesterday. I’ve started reading through her tips for some extra ideas. Some of her tips don’t work for me, but some should be useful.

What do you prioritize in your mornings?

 

*I have never actually watched a cat video on YouTube. I’m using that as a figure of speech, since what I do at midnight is about as productive as cat videos.