Purpose in the Little Things: Daily Routine (and How We Built It)

This post is part of a series of posts I'm doing about our journey in home management and homeschooling. You can find the first post and links to the rest of the posts here.

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After we established a good routine for getting ready in the morning, I spent a good deal of time thinking about what a typical day should look like for us. There is an awful lot to squeeze in a day! We try to make time for devotions, reading aloud, chores, play, going outside, meals, naps, and of course, all of Ava's school. It's like a big complicated puzzle.

I should say at the outset that I am more of a routine person than a schedule person. If I tried to go strictly by the clock, I would drive myself crazy. I'm just not wired that way, and there is too much unpredictability in my house to be able to schedule activities with any sort of precision. Our days do have a general flow to them, however. We do the same things in the same order most days, which works just fine for us.

I started building a routine by thinking about the things in our day that tended to happen every day at about the same time. This consists primarily of meals and naps for us. Those became the backbone of our day. As I looked at those things, I began to see that there were small “pockets” of time between them: the time between breakfast and snack, the time between snack and lunch. I also realized that the kids had small pockets of time that I didn’t have, like when I was preparing lunch or putting the baby down for a nap.

I made a list of all the things that we needed to do both daily and weekly and began to fill in the gaps. I realized pretty early on that not much school can happen when all four kids are awake. There are too many demands; Ava and I can barely have a conversation, much less do a lesson. From the get-go, I knew that the bulk of our school would have to be in the afternoon.

When we started the school year, Clara was taking morning and afternoon naps, Genevieve took an afternoon nap, and Tim was taking a quiet time (which sometimes turned into a nap). We did, at that point, have a little time in the morning to do something more organized (usually art or something similar). By the end of the year, though, Clara had dropped the morning nap, Genevieve's afternoon nap has morphed into a quiet time, and Tim was up all day most days. All that to say, routines have to change frequently when you have babies and toddlers. There are some growing pains with that, but we've generally been able to find something that works at every transition point.

As it stands right now, our general routine looks like this (note the lack of times):

Wake up 
Eat Breakfast 
Circle Time--Rarely are we actually in a circle, but we tend to gather for devotions, catechism, poetry, read aloud time, and either art or composer study (This is a lot for them to sit through, so I might tweak it a bit this year).
Morning Checklist--Since the three oldest shared a room (until just this week), we waited until everyone was up and had already eaten breakfast before getting ready. Basically, I didn't want them up there turning on lights and slamming drawers and waking the rest of the clan.
Chores—What we do shifts from day to day. (You can read about how we do chores here).
Free time for the kids until lunch—Depending on the day, we might do a quick clean-up here or we might just go outside for a nature walk. If we are in the house, we might listen to Ava’s Spanish cd or the composer we are currently studying.
Lunch
Free time--Play outside for a bit and/or read books together.
Clara naptime/Genevieve rest—The kids have a small pocket of time while I put the little girls down for rest. I sometimes have the kids listen to an audiobook or the Spanish cd here too. They can color or work on a sudoku or play while they listen.
School—This is our time for the subjects that require more input from me. We generally start with math (because that requires the most focus), and move on to literature & history (which this year came from our Ambleside curriculum), spelling, Spanish (maybe 2x a week), and sometimes handwriting. I sometimes do a little school with Timmy while Ava is working on something more independent. He likes to do school, so I schedule his work. However, if he would rather play legos, that's fine with me. I think there is a lot of value in play, and he's not even in kindergarten yet. 
Dinner Prep/Living Room Clean up—The kids usually do a clean up while I’m fixing dinner. I’ve started freezer cooking, which makes it easier in this time to help them along when they get stuck. Cleaning the living spaces is a big job most days, so they usually need guidance and direction from me.
Dinner
Family time—this might be a walk or a bike ride when the weather is nice. Depending on how much time we have, we might read a chapter of a book together.
Evening Checklist
Bedtime for the littles!

There is a very delicate balance to all this, and sometimes in the moment I have to tweak it or decide that something just doesn’t get done that day. There are days that the baby goes down late and it’s too late for Genevieve to take a quiet time (lest she never ever go to sleep that night and keep everyone else up too) and she’s along for the schooling ride. It’s not ideal, but there’s grace for that, and I’ve designed the routine to be flexible.

Even though we sometimes have “off” days, having a general plan helps me not feel paralyzed by all there is to do. I know that there’s a pocket of time for the things that have to get done, and I know what to do when. It also helps the kids transition better from play to schoolwork, because they know that they have set times for everything. Things run more smoothly, there are fewer arguments, and we get more done. Win, win, win.