Getting out the door in the morning with kids sometimes feels like a behemoth undertaking, here are some tips to help you keep your sanity and feel less rushed.

Cute Boyfriend’s sister-in-law teaches 6th grade and has two little girls.  She is married to Cute Boyfriend’s brother who is also an engineer.  For the sake of this story, we will call her “Megan”.

Megan sent me a text message the other day and this is what it said,

“Hi! What do you do to get ready in the morning and have the children ready while getting out the door on time? Once I start work, I will have to drop the girls off at Before-Care at 6:30am (yikes!!) so I can be at work by 7.”

Here is my answer back to Megan,

“The best advice I can give you is to teach them how to get themselves ready.  They need to be able to get their own cereal in the morning, wipe up any messes they make and put the dishes in the sink.  They have to get themselves dressed and teeth brushed.

Having a stool that lives in the kitchen is great. Also, have a smaller milk jug that is “kid sized”, this will reduce spillage.

Finally, pre-approved outfits the night before are critical.  Zoe and I would argue every morning about what she was wearing until we could compromise.  Doing that the night before is a game changer.”

I honestly cannot stress enough how critical it is to teach your children to take care of themselves early.  As young children, giving them a stool so they can reach the sink and cabinets to get themselves a drink of water is a great way to start.  Being able to reach the sink means they can also learn to scrape their plate and put it in the sink.  Once they are older, they can start putting their dishes in the dishwasher, then loading the dishwasher, unloading the dishwasher and eventually, hand washing pots & pans.  If you wait until they’re in middle-school, you will be combating hormones and mood swings and you’ll be trying to teach them multiple steps instead of just the “next” step.

As far as tooth brushing, every kid is different but DO NOT over complicate this process.  For Ellie, Cute Boyfriend found an app that had a fun song and a cartoon that showed Ellie which teeth she should be brushing and for how long. This was GREAT for bedtime, but this process brought everything to a grinding halt in the mornings.  Either Cute Boyfriend or I would have to stop, pull up the app and sit in the bathroom while she brushed her teeth.

PLEASE NOTE: I will never, ever recommend getting a young child their own tablet or smartphone.  Do the research, they are bad https://www.wsj.com/articles/iphones-and-children But more importantly, they are a major distraction that will slow your child down!!!

In the morning, I recommend a tiny hourglass.  If you have more than one kid, get more than one tiny hourglass so no one comes in mid-brush and takes the hourglass because they too have to brush their teeth.  Tiny hourglasses work great because kids don’t have a firm temporal understanding, but they do love to watch the sand fall from the top container to the bottom container.  They might not do as good of a job in the morning with their teeth as they do at night, so make sure you are monitoring them at night to make any necessary corrections.  The morning teeth brushing with the hourglass is just to help cement the habit.  Once they are older and they have their own teeth brushing routine solidified, they will already be programed to brush in the morning, no tablet required.

Now, for the milk jug.  I recommend using the 8oz creamer bottle from Bed, Bath & Beyond.  If they spill, it’s not a huge mess, the bottle comes with a silicone top that is very easy for kids to put on and take off.  They are only $3.99 each, so if you have more than one kiddo, you can buy multiple bottles and use a china pencil (grease pencil) to write their name on the bottle, this also decreases the amount of time they will spend arguing over who left the milk out because their name will literally be on it. You can fill the jug(s) at night so they are ready to go in the morning.  Cereal before you leave and fruit or a cheese stick in the car on the way to daycare or school works great!

Finally, the pre-approved outfits…

I was happy if Quinn remembered pants each morning, because clothing was of zero interest to her.  Ellie loves clothes and loves dressing for the season.  But Zoe…oh my God…that girl woke up every single morning and asked herself, “what would a homeless princess wear?” and THAT is how she chose her clothes for the day.  It didn’t matter if there was a foot of snow outside, she would want to wear a skirt, one flip flop, one snow boot and 5 sweaters.  So, instead of arguing with her all morning and making us late out the door, we would argue about the wardrobe before her bath at night.  This way, she was already in her closet and we could argue about pajamas and the clothes for tomorrow all at once.

Photo by Porapak Apichodilok from Pexels

These are just a few helpful hints to speed up your morning routine and get out the door with the kids in time to get to work (and not feel like you just waged and epic war of which you are unsure whether or not you won…)