Thrive as a Stay-at-Home Mom- Organize those days!

Learn how to organize, prioritize and thrive as a stay-at-home Mom with your little ones!

Calendar and coffee — Get Organized Mama

How so? Get yourself a schedule. Do it.

Becoming a stay-at-home mom is absolutely amazing and if it’s what you want to do you will never regret making that choice. It’s the best job in the world (and yes, I mean job!)

That being said, leaving the workforce (or school) to raise your kiddos can feel very foreign in our overworked success culture. It can very quickly start to feel like you are simply surviving. Staying at home with our kiddos is work. But somehow we get it in our heads that because we get to be at home it shouldn’t feel like work. That it should somehow be like the best Saturday everyday!

That is simply not true. If you think it will be a walk through fields of flowers every day then you will very quickly burn out.

Put in the work now to identify what your family values and prioritize those things! Learn to organize your days to end each one excited for the next.

Staying at home not what you originally expected?

Getting to be a stay-at-home mom was always a desire of mine. Something I knew that I wanted years before I had kids and yet when the time came it didn’t look quite like what I thought. I knew it would be hard but it was challenging in ways I didn’t expect.

Open Dishwasher — There will always be more dishes! Always.

Yes, the days are long and there always seems to be food on the floor. Those things I knew would probably be a thing. What many moms (or stay-at-home dads too!) find out in the beginning is that it’s not the long hours, messy homes or 7th diaper change of the day that can get to you.

It’s the feeling of lack of purpose that can creep in and total lack of training for our new job. In the beginning we didn’t know how to be a stay-at-home mom yet. Expectations, boundaries and deadlines have been our benchmark for success since elementary school! Now your job is to love, care for and raise beautiful little people.

Gone are the days of performance reviews

For most of us we left behind jobs with actionable tasks, coworkers to jump ideas off of and clear measures of success. It can be really hard to take how we used to define “a job well done” and apply that to our life as a stay-at-home mom. In particular when you have a newborn.

Learning to organize and plan your day/weeks like a “normal” job breathes new life into staying at home! And I am not talking just making sure you have a nap schedule (though you totes should!).

Get down to the Nitty-Gritty

I am talking about things like knowing when in the day you will read to your children and how long. Because for a lot of us if you don’t know when and it’s not a routine there is a good chance it won’t happen. We all have things that we value and want to fill our days with. Make it happen by giving those activities a place to live.

One of the beautiful things about staying at home with your kiddos is that you get to be spontaneous. A friend calling you up for a playdate or Dad saying he can take a long lunch with his family is something to jump on! But when each day is up in the air, for most of us, that can be overwhelming.

Another season of life at home with kiddos is if/when you have older kids as well. You may be juggling homeschool, school pick up lines, or sports activities along with kids at home full-time! Gone are the long days of total freedom and things are busy. Learning to organize your day is just as important! Having too much time or too little can both be helped with this process.

I am going to go over how to start having a basic day organization that is centered around your family!

A open notebook with coffee — Don’t wait for the days to get better-make it happen!

Write Your “Perfect” Day Schedule

Start by writing down your day yesterday. Are you happy with what you have?
Highlight what you want to be the top two or three most important parts of your day. If they are not listed, add them at the end now. Maybe it’s a family walk, bible time with your kids, meal prep (start meal planning, mama! Life changer), arts/crafts or educational learning.
What parts of your day do you dread? Underline these. Like any job being at home with kiddos has the pros and cons! Acknowledge to yourself the parts of the job that you avoid or don’t like doing.
Write down something that you could do each day for you. Now, I’m a little weary of our culture today celebrating the *self-care Mama* as hard as it does but this is still very important! Maybe you feel so much more ready for the day once you put on makeup or you just really love having your coffee in a quiet living room each morning.

Start Fresh and write out your “Perfect” Day

Now, get out a new piece of paper and write out your perfect day!

Take your Perfect Day Schedule and start to fill it out! Place in wake-ups, meals, naps and bedtime.
At this point you can decide on what kind of Mama you are. Do you want to have a schedule with things down to a 15 or 30 minute time slots? Or do you want some automatic flexability worked in and instead write down the order in which things go? You can also do a bit of both! I like to have a more flexible timeline but I will also add in lengths of activities if I feel like I need that structure.
Take those most important things to your day and find a place where you know you can constantly do them. One of mine is bible time with my kiddos. While they are still at the table after breakfast everyday we read a bible story, practice our memory verse and pray for our day. Most days this takes five minutes. I LOVE knowing when, how and where we are going to do this daily. I used to struggle at this all the time and now it’s just what we do.
Give the things you want to avoid a place and a time limit! I don’t love laundry. But instead of it looming in the back of my mind each day I know when I am going to do it and I don’t worry about it till then. Setting a time limit for these things can also be so helpful! Example: I will clean up around the house for 15 mins every morning and then I will stop! It may not all get done that day or even week. BUT what you did get done is way better than simply not cleaning until you have guests coming over you have to go into a stressed overdrive.
Add yourself in! Honor the things that bring you high levels of peace throughout your day. Sometimes these are things that are hard to do or require a spouse to pitch in more but the things you love to do have value!

Best Tips

Work in “boredom” time for your family. Your kids do not have to be stimulated at all waking times of the day. They need the time to explore and figure out things for themselves! This could look like 30 mins after breakfast of free play for the kids while you check your email or clean the kitchen. Or maybe it’s the kids having to play by themselves while you put lunch together instead of watching a show on TV.
By giving activities time, especially the ones that you don’t love as much, you can create the boundary to do them well! For example: Let’s say that you don’t love pretend play. Set a limit in your mind and give it your all in that time frame. Once the time is up feel guilt-free to step back (though, in this example I often find that if I am truly giving it my all I am actually enjoying myself and continue!)
Work into your day “phone time.” Now I understand that this may be controversial. When you are home all day it’s hard sometimes to not be on your phone a lot throughout the day. But then comes the guilt. When we are always on our phones we can’t be near as present as we want to be-at least I can’t! Set a block of time during the day when you allow yourself to be on your phone without guilt. Then when that time block is over-truly get off.
Don’t worry if your day organization isn’t always specific. Monday-Friday for my family most of the second half of the mornings is a general “outing.” If you do this, know what those “outings” can be! I have a list of places that on any day I can go out with my kiddos and we cycle through those. I don’t personally plan where each day is in advance because I like to base it on things like the weather or energy levels.
If you are consistent with sticking to a general schedule each day you will find that you actually need it less! I used to have mine written down, and there are times we still do that, but as of now I don’t need it daily in writing in this season of life.
When kiddos are sick or you are home all day organize your home as its own “outing.” When planning a day stuck at home the hours can seem endless. Treat it like a class schedule from school! Dont move on to the next activity till the “bell” rings. Being a stay-at-home mom during times of sickness is hard, mama!

Now What?

Now, just like a good birth plan, admire your perfect day schedule and then throw it away! Not really, hahah! But it can feel like that. This is the goal and that certainly deserves a space on your fridge. Follow what you can of each day and allow it to edd and flow as needed.

The great thing about a basic day schedule for your family if you have kiddos at home is that everyday is basically the same. Which means once you create your schedule you simply reuse it daily! Those habits will slowly form and after a while you will find that consistently you are getting in each day the things that you value most and are most beneficial for your family.