How Routines Calm the Chaos of Life (+ My Stay at Home Mom Schedule) → A More Beautiful Life Collective

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In this podcast, we are talking about how to structure your schedule using anchors and routines. We talk about the importance of a rhythm in your day. Ultimately, we need to all be intentional about how we spend our time in order to spend it well. How can we redeem our schedules to better glorify God? I’ll give you some ideas to try, and then, I’ll tell you about my stay at home mom schedule.

S2E15 – What You Need to Know about the Christian Creeds – A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast

In this episode, we are talking about the high-church confessional documents and why you should engage with them. No matter what denomination you belong to, these confessional texts – like Christian creeds, confessions of faith, catechisms, and liturgies – have been incredibly influential in the history of the Church. We need to wrestle with what they say and determine how it fits in with our own personal statement of faith. Today, we are going to talk about why you should read these texts, and then, turn our focus to the Christian creeds in particular. Read more on the blog: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-christian-creeds/ Get a PDF copy of the Christian Creeds here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.kit.com/d080819cc1 Get the Doctrine and Theology Cheat Sheet Here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.ck.page/bd897d28d0 Get a list of the names of God here: https://a-more-beautiful-life-collective.ck.page/43d2d5cf6b Get a copy of our personal statement of faith creation guide here: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/product/we-believe-your-personal-statement-of-faith-workbook-pdf-download/ Get “Building Our Foundations: 10 Week Study” here: https://amorebeautifullifecollective.com/product/building-our-foundations-11-week-systematic-theology-book-bible-study/ Visit our Shop to get a copy of any of the resources mentioned in this episode: I’m your host, Cayce Fletcher, and you can learn a little bit more about me here. While you’re here, would you consider leaving a comment, rating, or review? You can find our podcast, A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube. Subscribe to the blog for access to our latest content and some freebies. I love creating and sharing resources with you. You can find all of our resources at A More Beautiful Life Collective Shop. Keep creating a life you love, and cultivating your heart for God.

Hey everyone! This is Season 2 Episode 13 of A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast. One of my favorite parts of the day is the quiet of the morning. I’ve been a morning person ever since I was little. Often, I was the first person up even into my teen years when I would wake myself up and get ready on my own for school. I kept early morning hours through college – even when that meant I was the first one to go to bed in my dorm. This served me well through my years of teaching, and even into these early years of parenting.

The morning always offers quiet contemplation, as you sip a cup of coffee and wake up. You think of the possibilities of the day, mulling over your to-do list and problem-solving issues. Unlike the late hours of the evening, the morning doesn’t catastrophize. And, it doesn’t lend itself as readily to mindless doom scrolling.

My morning hours are spent with a bible, paper, and pen. They are spent with a book and a cup of coffee. Right before the sun comes up, the rest of my house starts to wake up (everyone here is an early riser except my husband). So sunrise means snuggles on the couch before we start our day.

…

We often underestimate the way that our rhythms and routines impact our daily quality of life. The outcomes of our lives are the sum of our habits. So, we have to think deeply about what we want those habits and routines to be. When we work to develop spiritual disciplines – or to develop any positive habit to help us reach our goals – we recognize the importance of these small, quiet, daily actions.

When I transitioned home after working for five years, I began to recognize the importance of a solid stay at home mom schedule. I needed to be intentional about how I spend my time to use it wisely.

For the past month or so on the podcast, we’ve been thinking about how we can work to create a life we love. The first step is to rightly order our desires. The second step is to figure out what brings us joy and work to include more of that in our lives. The third step is to order our schedules so that it helps to keep these first two actions in place. It’s often said that you can tell what someone loves by how they spend their time and money. If our schedules are disordered, our loves are probably disordered. And, if our schedule is full of ‘have-to’s’ and ‘drudgery’, we will often feel like that is the sum of our lives.

As Annie Dillard says in The Writing Life, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”

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Biblical Principles for Our Schedule

We’ve talked about creating an ideal schedule based on biblical principles earlier this year. I used these principles when created my stay at home mom schedule, but they are applicable to anyone at any stage of life. In that podcast, we looked at four key biblical principles that can help us develop our ideal schedule:

We work out of rest. We don’t rest only when all of the work is complete. Instead, we build rest first into our schedule. Our work becomes an overflow of our rest. This means we schedule time for sleeping, sabbath, and feasting.
Our ideal schedule should follow a cyclical pattern in line with the sun, sabbath, and seasons. God instituted rhythms into the pattern of our days with the model of the day, week, and seasons. Even though modern life has seemingly made these patterns obsolete, it still is important to take a cue from nature for what we should be doing both in our work and rest.
Our ideal schedule and routines should incorporate balance. Resting is crucial, but so is work. Feasting and celebration are important, but so is fasting. By intentionally scheduling our time, we can achieve a better balance in our days.
We should incorporate the church liturgical year into our ideal schedule. In Season 2 Episode 10, we talked about the importance of the church calendar. Working these times of fasting and feasting into our days can help teach us the story of scripture while incorporating more balance into our lives.

Structuring Our Stay at Home Mom Schedule

Keeping these biblical principles in mind, we have to think about how to structure our days to allow for all of these things while rightly ordering our loves and incorporating things that we love to do. How can we possibly do this? How can we feel like we are not short on time?

Well, the simple answer is there will always be more that you want to accomplish than what you can do. But, that’s okay.

As we structure our days, it’s helpful to think in terms of a rhythm. When I taught poetry, we had to teach rhyme and meter. This often included clapping our hands when we got to a word that was stressed. The kids always loved learning about limericks because of their unique rhythm (and rhyme).

Just listen to one:

There was an Old Man with a beard,

Who said, “It is just as I feared!—

Two Owls and a Hen,

Four Larks and a Wren,

Have all built their nests in my beard!”

Yes, the rhyme is important, but what makes the poem memorable and fun to listen to is the cadence. It just makes you want to nod your head with the rhythm of the words.

A good schedule should follow this same pattern. Yes, you want order. But, you also want a rhythm. You want a cadence to the day that makes you nod your head and move on with the beat.

How do you accomplish a rhythm in your day? By using anchors to punctuate your time and cue your mind to move on to the next task. The anchor acts as a keystone habit that kickstarts your routine. It is foundational for having a schedule that helps you to be intentional and accomplish your goals.

This is all the more important if you are someone with a lot of self-directed time. When you have time that you are ‘the boss of’, you have to work not to waste it. This is why a rhythm is so important for a stay at home mom schedule.

Ideas for Anchors for your stay a home mom schedule (or anyone else)

The best anchors are those that you have to do. You can’t get around doing them. For the most part, these anchors are probably related to everyday human functions or your work schedule. We all have to eat. We all have to get up in the morning and go to bed in the evening. We all have points in the day where the work begins – whether at home or the office – and where that work ends.

Some anchors in your schedule could be:

Getting out of bed
Your morning coffee
Breakfast
Leaving for work/Arriving at work
Lunch
Coming home from work
Dinner
Going to bed

These anchors act as the punctuating point in your day. When you create an anchor-based schedule, you are using the anchors as the stressed syllable (if we are talking about the poetry example above).

The beauty of anchors is that because we will do these things (get out of bed, etc.) they act as a course correction in our busy lives. We may have every intention of going to a coffee shop and reading our bible, but if that is the only time we plan to read scripture, it probably won’t happen. However, if we make it a habit to read our Bible right after we make our morning cup of coffee every day, we will probably do it more often than not.

In the first case, we are needlessly creating friction in our schedule to accomplish our habits because we have to pack our bags, get in the car, and head to the coffee shop. In the second, all we have to do is sit down and read while drinking the coffee.

For any regular routine you want to add to the day, you should choose one of the anchors in your life and add that routine to it.

A good stay at home mom schedule will allow time for work and rest. It should center around a combination of you and your kid’s schedules. It should provide time for free play, time to get chores done, and downtime for you. A stay at home mom schedule is probably going to be determined by meals, naps, and schooltimes. These would be the anchors in your day.

Ideas for Rhythms and Routines for your stay at home mom schedule

The anchors act as a jumping-off point for a larger rhythm. The combination of all these rhythms and routines is what helps you to make your schedule. A routine is just a pre-planned set of habits that we do in a particular order. It is the essence of habit stacking. We all have certain routines attached to our anchors, but often if we are not careful, the routine will be to chill out, veg out, and numb out. We need to intentionally plan our routines so they accomplish what we want them to do.

For each anchor in the day, we can develop certain routines that include habits that help us reach our goals. Here are some areas of your life where it can be helpful to create a routine. Each of these routines will probably be a part of your stay at home mom schedule, but really anyone can benefit from adding these routines into their day. A good stay at home mom schedule will make sure their are habits in place for getting the house cleaned, kids dressed, and meals on the table. The beauty of these routines is that they reduce the effort needed to accomplish these essential tasks.

Morning Routine – What do you do first thing in the morning? Often, this determines the direction of your day. A good morning routine can include some of the following: (1) Spiritual disciplines like bible reading, prayer, and worship (2) Journaling and Personal Reflection (3) Planning (4) Exercise and (5) Caring for your Home. A stay at home mom schedule will probably include some kid-free time in the morning.

Evening Routine – In productivity circles, the morning routine is definitely the golden child. Everyone talks about the importance of getting things done in the morning and setting the tone for the day. But, your evening routine is really what allows your morning routine to be so effective. If you are staying up all night, you probably won’t even wake up in time to do anything other than race off to work. If you leave your kitchen a mess, your mornings might be spent playing catch up and tidying the house. You’ll never really move the needle. I am a morning person, so my evenings are often more challenging than mornings to keep that productive spirit going. A great evening routine will put technology, your home, and your stresses to bed so that you can unwind and relax. A great evening routine often begins with dinner time and then follows through until everyone is in bed. What do you want the focus of your evenings to be? A stay at home mom schedule will probably include some homemaking routines and then, sometime after kids are in bed to unwind.

Work – Whether you work outside the home or not, you need a routine to cue your mind to the work that you want to accomplish for that day. If you work outside the home, your work routine probably involves driving to your workplace and arriving. If you work at home, it involves switching gears after breakfast to start the tasks of the day. Either way, you want to redeem this time so that you don’t feel rushed and harried or bitter and depressed. How can you make the start of your workday something life-giving? Part of my stay at home mom schedule includes listening to a podcast while I do a couple of chores around the house. It gets me moving. Other people recommend getting dressed to the shoes or getting outside first thing to wake you up and get you moving.

Midday – We live in the age of microwave meals. When I was teaching (and especially when I was also pumping), I recognized how a work-through lunch can just wear you down after a while. I had 20 minutes to heat up my meal, go to the bathroom, eat, and pump at the same time. Yes, working lunches will probably always happen to some extent, but think about how to use your lunchtime as a reset to get your day back on track. I’ve heard of stay at home moms of older kids who use that time to eat by themselves in their rooms and read a good book. It’s their recharge time in their stay at home mom schedule. Other working individuals take 5-10 minutes of their lunch break and use that time to pray. Use midday to remind yourselves of who you are living for.

Coming Home – At the end of a workday, we want to do the opposite of the beginning. We are not gearing up for a long day of work; instead, we are decompressing and turning our focus to the evening hours with family and friends. If you work outside the home, use your commute to decompress and switch focus. If you are a stay at home mom, you can use this time to do a quick tidying of the house, make sure dinner is in the oven, and maybe steal a few minutes for yourself before dinnertime. This will help you to switch gears in your stay at home mom schedule.

Homemaking – Homemaking is something that we all do. We should all follow the pattern God set before us of making a warm, beautiful place to live for ourselves and those we love. Most of us though fly by the seat of our pants through life – and it’s no different in our homemaking. We want clean homes, but we are so busy and tired. Who has the time or energy to make things spotless? I did a whole series on the blog earlier this year about cleaning routines and homemaking. The most important thing is that we need to create routines that keep the chaos at bay in our homes and that help us and our families enjoy the time we have together in our homes. Being intentional about our homemaking routines is a crucial part of our stay at home mom schedule.

Meal Planning – Cooking is definitely a key part of a stay at home mom schedule. Family meal times can be an important part of discipleship. The best way to make sure that mealtimes actually happen is to plan for the meals that you want to have. To do this, you need to set up routines for your meal planning. Ask yourself: What system do you want to use? A binder, cooking out of your pantry, or something else? How often do you want to go to the grocery store? Do you mind doing repeat meals? Do you like leftovers? What about freezer meals or crockpot meals?

Hobbies & Mother Culture – In the last episode of this series, we talked about how hobbies can help us to be more mentally and physically healthy. They can help us to live a well-rounded deep life that includes lovely things. Most of us don’t regularly do our favorite hobbies because we are so busy. We don’t have a routine in place to help us to get to our hobbies. For each hobby that you have (and I recommend having five!), you should set up a routine in your stay at home mom schedule that allows you to make time for what you love.

Relationships – Lastly, you should set up some routines to help you connect with your family, your spouse, and your friends. Justin Whitmel Earley recommends having a deep conversation with a friend at least once a week. Other people recommend spending one hour talking with your spouse a day, one (date) night with your spouse every week, and one weekend away with your spouse every few months. Your routines could include a Sunday dinner and eating together with your family and closest friends. It could include trivia night, pickleball club, or regular camping trips. The point is you are setting up habits that allow you to spend time with the people you love. This is a great way to add some self-care to your stay at home mom schedule.

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What if I get off track in my stay at home mom schedule?

Now, we all have moments where something comes up – we have sick kids, we have to run an urgent errand, and we have a doctor’s appointment. Life always has a way of getting in between us and our best intentions. What should we do if we get off track?

Let the anchors bring you back to your ideal schedule.

Yeah, you woke up late and didn’t get to your morning routine. But, don’t sweat it. Instead, use lunch to bring back your focus and end your day well. You may intentionally choose to not do some of your routines when life gets in the way, but you have the next anchor to get you back in step with your goals.

When we are dealing with kids, life will always have an element of surprise. Being flexible and willing to course correct will be much more profitable for us than being too rigid in our schedules.

My Stay at Home Mom Schedule and Routine

Teaching definitely dictated my schedule. There were areas of life that I could add in routines and rhythms – like in the morning and evening. But, so much of my time was taken up by the workday. When I stayed home, I realized the crucial importance of having a solid rhythm for the day so that me and my kids didn’t spend all day watching Bluey and making a mess in the house.

Your schedules and routines change with the ebb and flows of the school year, new babies, pregnancy morning sickness, and more. This is my stay at home mom schedule that we’ve fallen into over the period of the last year or so. The details are evolving but it is a rhythm that I think we’ll stick to.

In the morning

6am – Wake up and do my morning routine: Make Coffee, Unload the Dishwasher, Start a load of laundry, Read my Bible and pray, Read a few chapters in my book, and do my morning pages. Normally, the kids wake up about halfway through and play while I read. I try to check my planner and budget and make a ‘top 3’ for the day to help me get some direction for what I need to do that day.
8am – We do our ‘morning chores.’ My 4yo feeds the animals and gets dressed. I get dressed, make my bed, and get breakfast going. Recently, I started taking 5 minutes to clean one thing in my bedroom which has been helpful. After breakfast is ready, we eat and I try to do a couple cleaning tasks around the house.
9am (ish) – Homeschool starts. My son is doing Memoria Press’ Jr. K curriculum this year. It is challenging for him (and yes, I know he’s young!). But, he has found such joy in writing. We do the writing part first, followed by worship, catechism, recitation, and finish with reading our Bible and a picture book or two. Sometimes, we’ll take a break about halfway through. The kids will color or play, and I’ll fold the laundry or take care of a couple of things.
11am – We are normally finished with school sometime around 11 or 11:30 depending on how early we start. This is free play time, and my goal is that this is when we will go outside to get some of our hours in for 1,000 hours outside.

In the afternoon

12pm – We try to eat lunch around this time especially if my husband can make it back for lunch.
2pm – By this point, we are getting ready for naptime or quiet time. I put my 2yo down for her nap, and my 4yo knows that this is the time he should spend either in his room playing or quietly playing where I’m at. Our quiet time routine is one I would definitely recommend for any stay at home mom. My son stopped taking naps around 2 ½ – 3 years old and I desperately need some quiet, alone time to recharge during the day. The rules are you should play in your room and play quietly. It is their time to entertain themselves. This helps keep the house quiet so as not to disturb the sleeping babies. It also gives me some time to work on my blog, rest, or even just read.

In the evening

5pm – After my kids wake up (any time between 3 and 5pm), I let them watch a show. Our rule to limit screens is that we can’t watch any shows until after quiet time. This gives me a chance to prep dinner. Sometimes, we’ll go outside too to try to finish up our hours for the day (if we are aiming at 3). It’s been hard to feel motivated during the hot summer months, but now that it’s fall and the weather is so nice we’ve been enjoying being outside more.
6pm – Dinner. I try to have dinner always around the kitchen table with the family. We also try to wait till my husband gets home from work before we eat which means our dinner hour can be a lot later in the day than other families with young kids. For a while, we tried to do family devotions at the dinner table, but now that we are homeschooling, we mainly do our bible reading during school. We do try to limit screen time at the table (which means no screens for me and my husband), but really dinner is what you can imagine it is with young kids: chaotic.
7pm – Bedtime and Evening Routine: The goal is that we clean up the kitchen and tidy the house each evening, but that doesn’t always happen. If I can at least load and start the dishwasher and clear the table, we are starting the morning off well. I try to check my planner in the evenings to mark what I’ve got done as well. Then, the kids put on pajamas, we read a book, and they go to bed. I like to go to bed early too, so I read or watch a show and am normally winding down and getting ready for bed not too long after them.

Even though I put timestamps by each of these, that is just a general time. We move through our days with a rhythm normally punctuated by our meals. If something comes up and we don’t do our morning rhythms, we can get back on track with lunch. If we have something in the evening and our evening routines are missed, we just get caught up in the morning.

I’ve found these rhythms give enough freedom that day after day I can follow them and feel productive and full. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but a rhythm like this can wear you out! Caring for little people requires a lot of your time! A schedule like this helps to avoid some of the issues of overpacked days or living in the car. Yes, we can run errands and go to parks and playgrounds, but the majority of our time is spent at home enjoying our home. It’s a great way to save time, be more productive around your house, and save money. Your house does get messier, but through routines, you can deal with that messiness.

What schedules, routines, and rhythms do you want to create?

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. So often, we move through life asleep at the wheel. We move from one fire to the next, putting them out. We move from one screen to the next, vegging out. We are constantly pulled. We have to be intentional about the way we spend our time so that we can make the most of it. Being intentional is basically just another way of saying you need to make a plan to create some habits and routines that allow you to have a life inclined towards loveliness, beauty, and the giver of all things good.

What new schedules, routines, and rhythms do you want to include in your life?

You can find our ideal schedule planner at the shop. You can also find all of our other bible studies and productivity resources. Don’t forget to subscribe – both to the podcast and the blog. Until next time, keep creating a life you love and cultivating your heart for God.

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