Motivating Mondays: Routine & I...A Love Hate Relationship!

I have a love hate relationship with routines in our house. I love them, because as any family knows children thrive on routine. (Actually I think everyone benefits from routines in general) It helps..Really it does. Keeping things the same is good for the status quo is good for my family. Now of course there is always something to be said about teaching kids to be flexible and I agree on that as well. I am speaking out the comfort of just basic routines to a small child. But the part I have a problem with has to do with Nash and his rigidness for routines and on the sometimes smallest levels.

I started noticing last year he would become agitated when we drove in the car sometimes. The lack of communication was a problem in him telling us what was wrong. But shortly after he started talking more we realized it was him noticing we were going different ways to places, such as Wyatt's school and the store. He knew the *normal* way we would go and anything that deviated from the path would become problematic. We would also head to the post office and drive right by Fred Meyers and he would become upset and confused because that route was for the store apparently and nothing else. He would become hysterical and it was hard to see. However we had to teach him there are different ways to get everyplace. I started taking different ways to try and break him of the rigidness of his directional routines. I also used transitioning, and warning to let him know we are dong something different than he might be thinking. So if we planned to go past the store to another location, I would tell him we are going to xyz but we are going to use the road to Fred Meyers to get there ok? This helped a little.

So routines in our house are thought about in a little different way, we want routines and the boys thrive for them and it helps the SPD in a lot of ways. It can also hinder it however in Nash's case. So we are learning ways to learn that we don't always need a plan.

Now for my Motivating Part....see its here someplace. Hahah. I use GOOGLE Calendar to keep track of everything not only for our household but I am a caregiver for my elderly grandmother and keep track of her things to.

So I color code everything or everyone and use my android cell phone to sync with it and keep track of everything. I dont know what I would do without it.

Here is our calendar from a few months ago. Looks crazy, but actually this was a pretty quiet month haha.

Menu Planning like I talked about last week is a routine. It helps gives me a little more time with the family & as you can see we can use all the extra time we can get! :)













~ Kristen