My regular daily routine is pretty, you know, routine.

Attempt to rise before my children.  (Though that Mosely is a hard one to wake up earlier than.)
Read quietly.  Write a little in a journal.  Check emails and get a touch of work done.
Prep breakfast, wake up the remaining sleeping younger kids who do not yet own an alarm clock.
Eat breakfast together.
Begin school at the table.
Teach/help/direct school until lunch.
Fix and eat lunch.
Wrap up the last set of help-needed school assignments.
Settle in for a few hours of work.  (And by a few hours I mean, some regularly interrupted time to sort of accomplish my tasks.)
Take a little break and find myself surprised that it’s already time to get ready for dinner – what?
Make dinner and eat dinner.
Hang out with kids, play games, do whatever.
Gather in the living room to read, write in our family journal and Nature Notes, pray.
Tuck kids in.  Repeat the process for one last round of – oh, wait, I need to tell you this/what’s for breakfast/where’s that one shirt?/do we have to take that hike tomorrow?/what are we doing this weekend? information exchange.

After I put the kids to bed, I begin work – usually writing.

But some nights I just don’t FEEL like it.  I’d rather watch the latest This Is Us or paint that green set of cubbies I’ve been meaning to paint since last spring.  (The yellow paint has been sitting by the door of the library since then.  Has not moved in all those months.)  I’d rather read The Help for the second time or draw out house plans for homes I’ll never live in.

I’d rather go to bed and lie there, not sleeping, because I’m not actually sleepy but I’m not entirely sure what I am.

That’s a genuine picture of the majority of my days.  Filled and sprinkled, of course, with the unexpected trip the doctor or the scheduled eye appointment/dentist appointment/counseling session.  The field trip or visit from friends or soccer practice or meeting or outing with buddies or you name it.

Sometimes in between all that routine something funny or silly or amazing or sad happens.  Sometimes all of those things happen in the duration of one single day – or in one hour.  I do live with five relatively dramatic human beings.  Well, one overly dramatic human being and four regularly dramatic human beings.  But still.  You get the picture.

That’s my life.  It’s pretty regular, in fact.    Sure, sometimes marshmallows appear in the medicine cabinet and often times the laundry might as well be an additional family member and the cat and dog are for certain extra family members.  But it’s basically a normal life.  Or, you know, normal to us, for the most part.

There’s not an awful lot of wiggle room in this schedule.  Not a lot of space to mix it up.  All the things need to keep happening, all the plates need to keep spinning, all the monkeys need to keep dancing.

That’s it.  A Day in the Life.  

What’s your schedule settling and looking like in your current season?

 

 

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