One of the most challenging parts of parenthood is coming face-to-face with my love/hate relationship with routine.
It is very difficult to be a Type A personality with an creative person’s soul. I crave a certain amount of order and predictability and yet I hate to be tied down. I have two Christmas Countdown binders (no, really, I do) — one begins in August, and just in case I get off-track, a second plan begins in October — and yet since birth (seriously, ask my parents), I have resisted having a bedtime. I am incapable of following a daily routine to the letter. As for JavaDad… well, he’s so consumed with dreaming up brilliant technical things in his head that he loses track of time, and other concepts, without the rest of us to remind him from time to time to get his head away from the computer and, you know, eat… shave… those kinds of things.
From the moment I was pregnant with JavaBoy I’ve been told that kids need routine, and I wholeheartedly agree — I really do see the benefit for them. As a parent, I try my best to stick to a routine for the kids and I’m pretty proud of myself for how well I’ve tried to keep this household running on a routine for the kids’ sake. We’re not perfect, but we’ve managed not to be THAT family — the one who always forgets the class projects or the library book that needs to be returned to preschool or when the school performance is or whatever. (No, I’m not referring to an actual family, just a concept.) I have grown a lot as a person in this area, for the children’s sake, but I still have a long way to go in other areas of my life — I still resist routine, even when I really want to embrace it.
One area where I’d like to introduce more routine is in my blogging life.
There is a blogging initiative that first started as just a once a year thing and is now a monthly challenge called National Blog Posting Month. The idea is to encourage daily blogging (EVERY day), which is what I am working towards. November is the original NaBloPoMo as it is nicknamed, but to encourage people throughout the year, they have developed a website with a theme for each month (blogging on the theme is optional). This month’s theme is… Routine! How appropriate, I thought, for the month when I finally decided to give this a whirl. Will I manage to blog every day this month? Who knows? I can already think of a dozen reasons why I may fail. But I’ll certainly never succeed if I don’t try. I will not blog about the topic of routine every day for the month of July, but the idea of “routine” keeps cropping up in my life — as I am trying to <GASP!> give up my beloved Diet Coke yet again, get back into a walking routine, and get into the swing of our summer routine, so you may see a few variations on the theme.
How about you — do you love routine? Hate it? Or find yourself caught between the two like I am?
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I am the queen of bedtime routines for my kids. When I started parenting, with twins, my husband had started a new business and worked upwards of 100 hours a week. It was me and two babies and by bedtime I was totally done, so I got highly efficient at the whole bedtime routine. Now I have two teenagers and two tweens and they still have bedtimes, but I stay up until 2 in the morning writing.
I bow down to parents of multiples — I suspect there is no way to survive twins (or more!) without a strict routine! Every time my kids drive me nuts I think, “oh my goodness, what if they were TWINS!”
And I have yet to meet a writer who either goes to bed early or doesn’t rise before the sun — they write on one end of dawn or the other, but I have never met one who goes to bed at 11 and rises at 7 — they either stay up until 2 or they go to bed early and wake up at 4 or 5. LOL!
I am a bit crazy about this. I know I need routine and yet, I resist it. Nay, I fight it. Though after three weeks of no school and no camp, everyone in my house needs it!
i love routine although once in a while i just need a day of down time. my oldest thrives on routine and whenever i try to have a day without one, he whines, complains and then gets into trouble out of boredom. so i guess its a good thing for him that mommy likes routine on most days.
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