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Tips for Managing Your Morning
If you’re tired of singing the “Hurry up! You’re going to miss the school bus,” blues, you’re hardly alone. Weekday mornings are always chaotic, especially for families with twins and triplets. Seconds before rushing out the door, you can always find children scrambling through the house hunting for that missing science report, gym uniform, or favorite hair band while Mom frantically signs permission slips with one hand and stuffs the ubiquitous peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into lunch boxes with the other. It’s a daily scene that makes every parent shake her head. Yet, instead of forcing everyone to wake up even earlier to get out on time, turn your family’s attention to the night before and take just 15 minutes to prepare and organize for the next day. The following are a few tips to make your morning routine more manageable.
Right after you finish dinner, for instance, have one of your twins set the table for breakfast (a simple chore for even young multiples) while the other twin pulls out the toaster as well as the family’s favorite boxes of cereal. As you guide them through their new routine, you can set up the coffee maker by grinding the beans and pouring the water in the chamber. Now all you need to do is switch it on in the morning. Try to keep weekday breakfast simple though, and stick to toast, yogurt, fresh fruit, and cold cereal—no scrambled eggs or pancakes (although you could try frozen waffles as a no-fuss alternative). If your twins insist on something more substantial, however, plug in a slow-cook crock pot filled with cinnamon oatmeal right before going to bed. The sweet aroma wafting through the house by morning will surely entice everyone out of bed.
Encourage your twins to do as much as they can by themselves, too, including making their own breakfast. It not only teaches them self-reliance and independence (skills that sometimes take twins and triplets longer to develop) but it also allows you a few extra minutes in the morning to get dressed. If your twins are still a bit young to maneuver safely in the kitchen, you can lend a hand each night before going to bed by doing some prep work—pre-slice some bagels so the kids can pop them into the toaster themselves and leave juice or milk in sturdy plastic cups on the lower shelf of the refrigerator within easy reach of little hands.
And what about all those peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that need to fill those empty lunch boxes? With a little patience, you can easily teach your twins how to make lunch for themselves. (We had our pair slathering on the peanut butter by the second grade.) Let them decide if they’d like to make their sandwiches the night before and keep in the refrigerator or in the morning after they finish breakfast. Either way, show a little patience and just turn the other way when you see all the peanut butter oozing out of the bread!
With a breakfast plan out of the way, it’s time to concentrate on the morning wardrobe. If you have young boys like me who haven’t yet acquired a fashion sense, simply pulling out shirts, pants, and underwear each evening and placing them in a designated area so that they can dress themselves in the morning shaves minutes from the daily madness. Yet school-age young ladies—or so I’m told—would rather have their hair pulled than have a parent choose their day’s wardrobe. One way to keep these fashion critiques organized is having them match outfits for the week each Sunday evening (a great idea for the working professionals in the household, too), and either storing them on hangers tagged Monday through Friday or on designated shelves in the closet, or buy a five cubby hanging canvas bag labeled with the days of the week. Any method your female twins choose should eliminate the last-minute rush to the ironing board, or worse yet, tearing through the laundry basket for that favorite pink pullover.
Next, create a family checkpoint—a location convenient to the front door where everyone can organize and store their daily essentials from backpacks and briefcases to milk money and car keys. You used color-coding when your twins were young to cut down on the chaos. Just continue the trend assigning a color to every member of the family. Try a hall table or small bookshelf with colored baskets tucked inside, assigning one basket per person. Or install a shelf with hooks near the front door. Place individual baskets on top for personal possessions like car keys and sunglasses and hang everyday coats neatly underneath on the hooks. But just remind the family that the checkpoint is a not a locker room and shouldn’t be used as a dumping ground as they walk through the door each night.
And finally, if you’re a forgetful bunch, write out a daily checklist helping everyone remember his or her gear. Take a sheet of paper and set up a grid with days of the week running down the side and family members’ names across the top. For instance, “Tuesday—John—trumpet,” or “Wednesday—Suzie—library book.” To keep it neat, have it laminated and make it visible by hanging it on the back of the front door or hall closet.
When mornings are more organized it translates to a more productive day for everyone. Just a few changes in your family’s routine and you’ll all reap the benefits.
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