Learn Something New Every Day 2014

Hello, my name is Lindsay, not that you'd remember that, since it's been 9 months since my first and ONLY post on this blog. September 1st marked the beginning of Learn Something New 2014. I will be following along with Shimelle again this year, hopefully with a bit more success and dedication than in years past, although obviously I'm already a bit behind with my blog posts... I've decided to use my blog as an initial form of documentation for my daily lessons, and to follow Shimelle's lead and post a daily photo with a single sentence summarizing the lesson on Instagram. My plan is to then use the Collect app to pull together my photos and captions for printing, and to put them together in a Studio Calico Handbook. I think this will keep the time commitment to a minimum, but keep me accountable and give me the benefit of a physical/creative component to look back on.

This September, I am definitely most excited for a return to our daily routine, and hopefully a few new routines to help simplify our lives. School officially starts tomorrow, which means Dan will be back to work and the kids are back at daycare. I love that my husband is a teacher and that he gets to take the summer off to spend with our children, but I've definitely noticed the lack of structure to our days over the past two months. I've also been reminded of what we learned early on with Claire - she THRIVES on routine. The kids were getting harder and harder to handle as the summer progressed, and I can't help but think that maybe they were missing our daily routines.

The return to school also means a return to hectic schedules, which will be made even worse by Dan's new position as VP and the extra travelling time required to get to his new school. I'm trying to accomodate these changes by being extra prepared and adding a few new routines into our daily schedule. For example, I've been very diligent about making sure the kids' clothes are out for the next day before we put them to bed at night. This has DEFINITELY improved our mornings, because there is no fighting about what to wear, since their outfits were picked out the night before. I've also been diligently doing a load of laundry every night after I get the kids to bed. By keeping on top of the laundry like this, I'm finding that it takes a lot less time and, as an added bonus, the stains they're coming home from daycare with are much less stubborn if I don't give them time to set! 

The next new routine on my list? MEAL PLANNING. We're getting home later than we used to from work, and the kids are absolutely STARVING by the time we walk through the front door. I definitely need to start planning ahead, and I think that some awesome slow cooker recipes are going to be a must to help deal with this issue. I'm feeling slightly overwhelmed at the prospect of planning our meals out, since we've struggled to stick to our meal plans in the past, but it's time for me to just bite the bullet and get it done. I'm hoping that my extra determination this time around will help us to stick with it.

These new tasks I've added to my day probably don't technically qualify as routines yet - they're still too new. But I'm sure that if we can stick with them long enough (say, for the month of September) then they will become habits and routines that will help to improve the flow of our daily comings and goings. With some of these new habits, I'm already noticing major improvements. Now we just need to keep that momentum going.

Hello September. Hello new habits. Welcome back routine, my old friend. I've missed you.