Our Current Morning Routine as a Family of Four

(Thanks to Amazon Health and Culturelle® for sponsoring this post and letting us document our morning routine as a family of four!  Culturelle® is a trademark of DSM.)

These are the days. Sometimes they feel long and hard and I find myself counting down the hours until bedtime and realize there are almost too many left to fit on one hand.  But amidst the diaper blowouts, the short naps, the dinner refusals and the bedtime shenanigans I know these are the days we are going to miss the most all too soon.  The days of chubby thigh rolls and simple milestones.  The days when I can dry up tears by finding a “crystal” in the front yard or make her laugh with just a silly face or voice.  Since evenings are often times unpredictable and sometimes chaotic, we prioritize long slow mornings in our house. (It helps that Parker’s school doesn’t start until 9am and Aaron works mostly on west coast time.)  We partnered with Culturelle® to share our current morning routine since their Grow & Thrive probiotic drops are a regular part of our day.  (And just remember, for every beautiful morning like this one, there are twice as many where Aaron is traveling and I’m single momming it and Parker doesn’t want to eat what I made for breakfast. Not every morning is magical, but we do our best!)

5:30am Aaron starts his day at the gym (because he is a crazy person dedicated like that) while the girls in the house sleep in.

7:00am Ever and I are usually awake by now. In a few months when I’m sleeping through the night more consistently, I’ll start waking up half an hour before her. I treasure that time by myself, but at the moment nothing is more important than sleep when I can get it!

7:15am Aaron is home from the gym and I nurse Ever while he and I catch up a bit. “How did you sleep?” “How was the gym?” “What does your day look like today?” is usually how the conversation begins…

7:30am If Parker isn’t awake by now, we wake her up so that she goes to bed easily at night and so that she isn’t rushed to get to school.  Aaron starts breakfast and I give Ever her Culturelle® Grow & Thrive probiotic drops before feeding her solids.  In addition to the probiotics that are so good for her gut health, the drops include Vitamin D which is something that most doctors recommend for  babies supplement, too.

The next hour of our morning routine as a family of four is a mix of breakfast-eating—usually eggs and toast or oatmeal and fruit—smoothie-making, and lunch box packing.  Parker loves to help with the smoothie making!  We always talk about what’s going to happen that day—what we will do after I pick Parker up from school and what she has going on at school that day.  We’ve started asking her two questions each morning that we can follow up with her on at the end of the day.  We ask her what she is most excited to do that day and one thing that she wants to do really well that day.  Her answers are sometimes silly and sometimes heartbreakingly sweet like, “I want to be helpful today or I want to be a good friend to Iris today”.

8:55am Aaron and Parker leave for school and I take Ever upstairs for her morning nap. Two sweet, precious hours of family time already in the book.

Would I like to work out in the morning? Yes!  Get some emails out of the way? Of course!  But for the moment, this sweet part of our day where we get to cook healthy food together and chat about school and friends and what’s going on in the world is worth more than all of the organized inboxes and toned tricep muscles in the world.

Photography by Katie Jameson