Growth Mindset

Creating Morning Routines

Somedays, the mornings are my favorite part of the day, and some other days, they do not get started on the right foot, and my whole day feels off. My typical routine looks like this:


5:30 AM Wake up with my 9 month old (we are working on this, because 5:30 am is not my jam)

5:35 AM Feed Emmie her bottle

5:45 AM Soak in as much rest time as possible until Emmie wants to play

5:55 AM Emmie decides she no longer wants to rest and it’s time to play

7:00 AM Relocate downstairs to put on coffee, feed Emmie breakfast, make household lunches

7:30 AM Play more but in the downstairs space where Emmie can have some safe independence practice and I can do a little bit of work (usually in five minute increments)

8:00 AM Put Emmie in for her nap

8:15 AM Fifteen more minutes of work

8:30 AM Exercise for a half an hour

9:00 AM Get ready & drink coffee

9:30 AM Emmie wakes up and we get ready to head out for the day, so Kim and I can have the girls play together and we can work


We do this almost everyday. A few days a week Dillon will take the morning shift with Emmie, and I get to rest or do a little work if I can’t fall back asleep, but this is our family’s morning routine. Now, do I know with 100 percent certainty that if we deviated from this schedule the day would go horribly wrong and I would be a mess, and Emmie would be crankier and Dillon would have a bad day… no, but am I pretty confident that having the wrong start to our morning does make it harder to recover and have a good day.


Studies show that children and their parents thrive when routines are put in place, and I know that on the days where I can have my steady routine, I do feel better. Whereas on the days when Emmie’s naps end early and I can’t exercise or take a peaceful shower that lasts more than two minutes, it affects both of us. The mood of one parent can affect the household, and that mood can be absorbed by others. So, if I am in a great mood, my morning routine was a complete success, the likelihood is, Emmie is having a great day, and I’m way nicer to my husband. But to be honest, on those tough mornings, it’s not always easy to feel nice, and that could ruin all of the people’s days that I come into contact with.


But let’s chat about families with older children, the ones who have to fight in the morning for shower times, or struggle to get out of bed in the morning, no matter how many times the alarm goes off, or even better, the ones where the children are screaming throughout the house over “borrowed” clothes (this last one is very familiar to our household growing up). The very idea of a morning routine just feels a little out of reach here!


However, these households are the ones that will benefit the most, we just have to start slowly. It is such a great idea to start creating routines early in life, and the household morning routine is the perfect way to band together as a team and create a morning goal list.


So start with this question: what do you want your morning to feel like & look like?

Then create your goals for your morning routine that will help you achieve this morning schedule as a family

Pick one goal and meet that one successfully

Add another one and keep going until you have incorporated all of your goals for your morning routine

When you have achieved your family’s ideal routine, revisit it as a team and make sure that it is working well for everyone


I know that sometimes the very idea of creating goals is intimidating. For people who get anxious when they think about committing to a schedule, starting slowly using the steps outlined above will be the easiest way to tiptoe into this. You might even realize that you already have a good baseline routine that just needs a little tweaking.


Our goal is to bring more joy into your household, and provide small adjustments that have a big impact on your life. Something as simple as putting on the coffee when you first wake up, so you’re not waiting for it to brew when you really need to be on your way to work, is a game changer! Or having your children pick out their clothes the night before or over the weekend, adds so much more peace to your household.


So join us this week on Instagram where we’ll share tips, important resources, and more as we look to work with you to create your morning routines and improve our own!

Back To School Anxiety

Anxiety is not always the easiest feeling to recognize. Happy, sad, mad, sleepy… those are all relatively easy to put your finger on when someone asks for you to tell them how you are. However, anxious, is a feeling that sometimes requires a little bit more of an investigation into your body and where this feeling lives. For me, anxiety percolates in the pit of my stomach and then builds a little nest in my chest, making me feel uncomfortable. In my head I can do a physical check to see that I am okay. I even remind myself, let’s look at the facts and not the feelings, but that doesn’t always make that anxious feeling go away. Sometimes, even when I work through the reasons why I might be anxious, it takes my body a little while to catch up to my brain. This makes me more anxious!


Now, as an adult, with years of practice of examining my feelings, and more recent practice expressing them, I still find it difficult to share with others why I might feel anxious. So, I can only imagine that as a child, feeling this way, and not always having the tools to work through it, could be scary, creating potential panic.


This week we are focusing on back to school anxiety, specifically for students, but parents, this includes you too! Sending your child to school is stressful, especially if this is the first time for you. So don’t forget that while we want to share ways for you to help your child overcome this difficult feeling, we need to make sure that you are prepared too!


All throughout this week we will be sharing mantras, tips, and articles (easy, quick reads) that will help you and your child to feel more connected, and most importantly, provide you with more tools to overcome some back to school anxiety your child might be facing.


Sneak Peek Alert: Wednesday you’ll see an article that will share how parents can help their children and recognize anxiety without their children specifically telling them that something doesn’t feel right. One of my favorite tips is to address the anxiety and not avoid it. Even as an adult, if I am feeling anxious, it is so much easier to put on the TV and try to drown out the noise in my head. I try so hard to push the panic deep down where I don’t have to think about it, but my body doesn’t feel any better after I do this. However, if I had just addressed these feelings head on in the first place, it might have taken less of a toll on me, and I could have recovered faster. So now, I do my best to do a little self reflection instead of avoid what might be the cause of the anxiousness.


In a world where there is so much around us to provide us with the distraction that we want, sometimes all we need is a quiet, safe space, and a little reassurance from our parents.


Be sure to following along on our Instagram stories to get amazing resources on how to make this back to school season a positive experience for your child!

Self Reflection

Sometimes I get stuck in my head. Now, I know I am not the only one out there who does this, but I am constantly running potential scenarios in my mind about what might happen throughout the day, and then I think about how I might handle those scenarios. I am going to attribute this to the fact that I have a face that is easily read, so if someone surprises me and I am not thrilled by the surprise, I need to be able to adjust my face, so no one’s feelings get hurt. But most importantly, I don’t like to be too reactive, so I prepare. I reflect.


As a parent, there is very little free time in the day, but in those moments where you can free up a little mental room, making some space for personal reflection is a game changer.


Reflection can improve relationships: when my feelings are hurt by someone I love, I need time to decide what I want to say, and every single time, what I end up expressing is completely different than what I would have said if I did not take the time to walk away and reflect. Initially, I would want to yell, maybe cry, or even say something mean. It is very easy to react negatively in a negative situation! But, when I walk away, I am providing myself with the space to feel my feelings, and craft a response that will make a positive change versus something that will add gasoline to the fire.


Reflection can enhance your work day: One of my favorite things to do with my previous work team was to reflect. We would have a big event, like school orientation, where we would welcome hundreds of students and provide days of fun and learning. After this event, our team would sit down together and share in the glory of the wins we experienced, but even better was when we could recognize where we would like to make improvements for the next event. We made it a point to not beat ourselves up over a missed step, but considered it an opportunity for growth.


Reflection can and should be taught to our children: it is not always easy to self-reflect, and as you’ll see in a few of the articles we share this week, many CEO’s struggle with taking the time and knowing what to ask themselves while quietly thinking. So, the earlier we start to teach self reflection, the easier it will be for them to partake in this activity. Start with this: daily highs and lows. Everyone goes around the dinner table and shares what the best point of their day was, the worst point of their day was and end with how they improved someone else’s day. If you are just starting out, even getting your children to open up about these three questions is a win! If your children aren’t comfortable sharing aloud yet, provide them with a notebook to write their answers in, and eventually ask for them to share. When you have made it to the sharing part and conversation is flowing, ask follow up questions like: how could that negative moment have been changed? Or, how did your low moment affect someone else? This helps children start to think about how their inner feelings affect behavior, which affects other people.


Self reflection helps us to build the life that we want, and be the people that we want to be around. After all, you cannot run from yourself, so let’s reflect upon becoming the person you want to run towards.


Stay on the lookout for everything we are sharing this week: thought provoking questions to get you started on your journey, articles that go into more depth on the importance of self reflecting, and a few fun things that we love and want to share with you!

Making Summer Memories

The summer time brings back so many different memories for us all. Maybe it’s the sounds of the ice cream truck, the smell of sunscreen, the feel of the sand under our feet, or the swelling excitement building in our chests for vacation. Each and everyone of us have special memories of what it was like to experience summer as a kid, and hopefully those memories sometimes involve our parents!


Becoming a mother myself, I have to say that I have never appreciated my own mom more. She raised four girls and during the summer cared for two more girls. That’s six kids, people! You would think that six girls would be able to stay busy all day with each other, but shockingly no matter if you have one kid, or six, children need guidance on ways to stay active during the day to avoid that awful summer “boredom.” (I think as parents now, most of us would give anything to feel even a little bored; I’m not sure when it changes from being bored to getting to relax, but I know I miss it!)


Deb (our mom), had a house full of girls that she tricked into reading for fun. Now this might come as the most shocking fact about myself, but growing up, I struggled with reading and I did not enjoy it during the school year. Forget about writing! Yet, here I am now, a woman who studied English and education in college, who loves reading and writing for fun.


So how did she do it?! She turned even the most boring of tasks into adventures and games. She needed things to do with all of us throughout the week, so she incorporated weekly trips to the library. She let us spend what felt like hours in the library finding books that we liked. She let us enroll in the library reading programs, the ones where they give you prizes for finishing books, but only if we wanted to. She made it feel special with gentle encouragement instead of mandating it, or making it feel like a chore.


Another tool my mom used to keep us busy was “playing school.” There is something about playing school versus being in school that changed the tone of the tasks we were doing. She got all of us to spend time every single week writing book reports, yes I said it, we wrote book reports during the summer… for fun!


It might sound crazy because there is no one there to really check if your children are reading and writing like they learned throughout the school year, but just the practice helps kids avoid the summer slide! Learning is just like a sport or a skill- when we take time off from learning, our muscle memory might be there a few months later, but we have to work a lot harder to get back to where we were in May or June when summer started. However, you do not have to be the expert… I repeat no experts are needed here! Just the opportunities to practice are the important part.


So what should you take away from this?!

We know it is not easy for you, as a parent who is so busy with work, household management, providing meals, raising children, and if you are a real go-getter… trying to have a social life, to also teach your children. So easy things that you can do during the day, that would also likely provide you with a little more free time to get some of these things checked off of your list… create some designated reading or writing time for your children. If you have resistant or reluctant readers, start small, we do not want to scare them away the first week!


Some Ideas

  • Plan trips to the library (pick out a book for yourself too, you deserve some fun!).

  • Provide a special notebook where they can write down any fun activities they did that week.

  • Have your children join book club (this can be with you or independently with their friends).

  • Print out teacher created independent reading comprehension questions.


Ways to make it fun

  • Make any special outings related to reading a surprise and when you arrive, share your level of excitement with your children.

  • If you are purchasing books or notebooks for your children, have them become rewards or gifts.

  • Create an incentive program in your home (if you read 3 books, then you will get to pick out a special dinner/ if you read up to 6 books, you will get to go on a fun outing/ if you read 10 books. you will get to have a present. This works for writing and answering comprehension questions too).

  • Encourage independence-when providing independent work, praise them for being able to try something on their own.


Everything you do will create such amazing memories for your children to look back fondly on!


Check out research based links for more information on the importance of avoiding the summer slide!


What we say, and how we say it matters

Let’s get a little more specific here; how we label our children and students matters! For years we have used the word struggling to define ourselves, or anyone who isn’t very good at something yet. I personally have never thought twice about using the word struggling. It isn’t the most offensive word out there, and it is pretty to the point. We ask people to let us know when they are struggling so we can help them. We express how important it is to keep at something you are struggling with. But if you were labeled struggling, would you really want to keep at it?


I cannot express how much I have enjoyed using the free resources over on the scholastic website to keep learning, but stumbling upon the From Striving to Thriving- How to Grow Confident Capable Readers, author Stephanie Harvey and Annie Ward's webinar, has changed my life this week.


They have taught me that a simple word change creates a gigantic mindset change. Switch out the word struggling for striving. That’s right everyone, we are no longer strugglers, we are strivers! I don’t want to ever think of myself as struggling anymore, but striving everyday to be better.


So let’s use this for our children and students too. Don’t let them hear you say that they are struggling readers, learners, athletes, etc. Don’t let others call them that anymore either. It is okay to share this awesome piece of advice with everyone you know now.


If you change the word, you change the connotation of experiencing difficulty. “We replace the dooming label 'struggling readers' with the effort based term 'striving readers' because it connotes energy, action and progress.” - Stephanie Harvey and Annie Ward


We are so much more than our struggles and hardships, and everyday that we work to improve our lives means that we strive to thrive.