Believe me when I say, creating a schedule for your daily routine makes taking care of little kids so much easier. I currently have 2 toddlers and if I didn’t have a daily schedule, my life would be pure chaos. However, what I’ve learned from following a daily routine is that I need to stay flexible because it always changes and each day may bring its own unique twists, like appointments or play dates. Before you get too attached to any specific schedule, just know that your whole routine will eventually evolve as your kids develop and change. Sometimes it changes as often as month to month when they are babies. Instead of just giving you an example of our current daily schedule, I am going to talk about how I create my own stay-at-home mom schedule with my toddlers.
Base Schedule on Priorities
First thing’s first, you need to find out what you’d like to stay consistent. I personally prioritize sleeping and eating because those things affect my kids’ attitudes the most. Things do start to get tricky when you have multiple children who sleep and eat at different times, so it is definitely a balancing act at times. The easiest thing to do in this situation is to write down your wake times, morning routine and when your night routine starts because these mini routines rarely change. Then, add in any nap times and the approximate duration of those naps. Where there are overlapping wake times, try to schedule 3 meal times with a snack time when both kids are awake between breakfast and lunch, as well as a snack time in the afternoon between lunch and dinner. And just like that, you already have the bare bones of a toddler schedule. As both of my children grew older, it did get easier to schedule meals together as they both started having more wake times.
Don’t Complicate the Schedule
I don’t always like to schedule specific activities for certain blocks of time. Instead, I like to schedule “free play” between meals and naps. I think it’s important for toddlers to be able to practice making choices with how they want to play. And frankly, when I plan specific activities, like “play outside,” things outside my power happen, like it will start raining. I find that if I physically and mentally sort and categorize different activities into baskets or zones in the house, we can still do a variety of things during the day, but we don’t need a rigid activity schedule.
Keep Your Kids’ Activities Organized
Part of the reason why a daily schedule is helpful with toddlers is that it helps to keep them busy. Even though I do tend to give my kids more time for unstructured play, I still like to make sure they are keeping busy with a variety of activities. I do this by categorizing toys by type, such as pretend play, sensory, gross motor or miscellaneous and put them in a toy rotation. For example, I can put away the tea party set in exchange for the toy fruit cutting set for a pretend play activity. Or, exchange the kinetic sand for play doh for a sensory activity option. This way, every few weeks, when I rotate old toys back, my kids act like it’s Christmas morning again!
If that seems confusing and a lot to juggle, sometimes it is. If it helps, you can try writing down activities and toys available at your home, so that you can visualize your options and you don’t feel like you need to commit your children’s catalog of toys to memory. You can even make this process less overwhelming and just write down different activities and toys you can offer to your children for the current week, then you can write down a different set of activities or toys to play with the following week as you rotate in different toys. This is just an example of how I like to organize my kids’ toys, but as all parents know, the toy situation can get overwhelming and there are a number of ways to stay organized. Use whatever method is suitable for you and your situation. As far as our schedule, these “free play” time blocks are for me to provide the activity choices and for my kids to lead the way!
A Quick Note About Screen Time
This is my disclaimer that even though screen time is not normally something that is specifically scheduled in our day, we do use screens in our family. When you have kids, it’s impossible to not hear about the general recommendations around limiting screen time for young children. I’m sure we all try our best to minimize screens and keep our kids busy with open ended toys and physical activities, but I have to be honest, I am not perfect, nor do I want anyone thinking that I am. Maybe one or all of us are not feeling well, so we have screen time during a “free play” block, guilt free and I don’t hate it. Sometimes we all need a break and need to watch a Disney movie to reset.
What about Housework?
You might have noticed that I don’t mention any housework in my stay-at-home mom schedule at all. That is because I still tend to clean messes immediately after they are made. I found that this is the most efficient way for me to get housework done within the day without having to block out too much time for it. I mentioned this cleaning tip in a previous blog, “5 Housecleaning Tips for Busy Moms.” Yes, this means that at times, my kids need to work on their waiting skills while I clean up after meals, but it’s a good skill to work on at this age. If all else fails, you can help them wait by setting up a visual timer and letting them know that you will be ready to play afterwards. There are so many visual timer apps available through the Apple App Store, but one of my favorite visual timers is the “Little Timer” app. It has fun music and my daughter loves seeing what animal is going to hatch from the egg when the timer goes off. I also leave the larger cleaning jobs for times when one child is napping and the other is at preschool, or at the very end of the day when both kids are sleeping. This way I can spend most of my children’s wake time present with them.
Add Mom Time
Scheduling in some “mom time” is an important part of building my stay-at-home mom schedule, since it helped me find myself again after becoming a mom. I personally like to have this time either before the kids wake up or after they are put down to sleep. This is a time where I can practice self-care, read, work on a project, cook or clean without any interruptions (and before anyone says anything, I actually do enjoy cooking and I find cleaning therapeutic). Even though I call this “mom time,” I also love to use this time block to spend time with my husband, chat about the day and eat snacks together!
I guess the moral of the story is that having a daily schedule is helpful when taking care of children and yourself. It helps you stay organized so that the big priorities of the day are not missed and it keeps the day moving along productively. However, I still believe that there should be some wiggle room for free choices, so that everyday doesn’t become too monotonous. In the end, however you would like to sculpt out your unique stay-at-home mom schedule with your children, just know that you’re doing a good job! It’s tough to fit in everything you want to do in a day while keeping your little ones busy. As long as everyone is happy, healthy, and everyone is fed, I would consider the day a win!
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