As this postpartum series is—finally—drawing to a close, I felt it important to cover how to get a functional schedule down. Now, I’m not you, so what feels good for me, might be different than what will be effective for you and your family. Still, I hope that sharing my process will help you figure out how to craft a day that works for you.
I like to think of the day in different segments:
- rising – includes getting up, and goes through breakfast
- morning – everything from breakfast until lunch time
- lunch time – when you’re eating, as well as anything else happening in this time
- nap block – time at home when your kid(s) will hopefully be napping
- afternoon – post-nap (ish) until we’re eating dinner
- evening – after dinner, but before bedtime slot
- bedtime routine – everything pre-bedtime, and active bedime-ing
- kids asleep – (mostly) child-free time
When you break your day down in segments—and you may have ones to add in, or to take away, depending on your situation—you can focus on improving one slot at a time, instead of attempting to overhaul your entire day all at once, while also juggling the demands of small people. Plus, it gives you the flexibility to have different things on different days, while still maintaining a sense of order and flow.
To better illustrate this, I’ll share what might be included in each of my days’ segments, plus a weekly schedule:
rising – I have a post on our morning routine, if you want more information, but this includes getting everyone ready for the day, feeding my swarm of cats, and getting every human fed
morning – once our family member’s basic needs are met, I do a tidy up of our house, since the kids are usually up before me, playing. Tidying toys; rotating couch cushions and opening curtains; loading and/or unloading the dishwasher. Just making sure everything is reset. If I’m planning to exercise by myself, I usually do it in the morning, too.
lunch time – I think of this as an hour-long block. For me, this is the first big ‘marker’ of the day (making it about 1/3 of the way through haha). I make lunch for myself and the kids, and clean it up. Typically, I try to connect with Todd a bit, as well, if he’s breaking for lunch at the same time. Sometimes there is a little more picking up, at this point (because kids); or I get out anything that needs to thaw for dinner. With that done, the kids and I can play a little, or I can snatch a few minutes for myself.
nap block – one thing in my schedule I’m extremely firm on is the nap slot. As kids grow, they sort of shift around when they need to take a rest, so I block the entirety of noon to 3 pm off for napping. This prevents me from getting upset if my toddler doesn’t go down soon enough, and allows enough rest time when he does decide to succumb to sleep (which, I cannot reiterate enough, he has been very excellent about lately, evening telling me he’s ready to go nap…and actually following through. I’m going to soak this up while I can). Unless something comes up that HAS to happen during this time, I jus think of it as completely unavailable to other things. With one down, during the week, this is when I find is the best time to do some homeschool with my oldest, as there’s no little brother tornado-ing through our work.
afternoon – in our home, this is somewhere between 2-3:30 pm. I’m done with putting kids down (hopefully), and done with homeschool (typically). Now is when I can get in some reading, or just plain down time…or hyper-focus time. Whichever. It’s a slightly less hands-on time to try and rejuvenate before the evening haul. Keep in mind, this is often the time I’m most frustrated, if things didn’t go as smoothly earlier. Real life isn’t perfect every day. If we have errands we weren’t able to attend to in the morning, we do them at this point.
late afternoon – there is a distraction for me here, because 3-5 often includes when I make dinner, or can be when we are working with out trainer. Regardless, every day, I usually am busy during this time.
evening – for our family, evening starts once we have dinner, or as soon as we’re done exercising. From there, we can spend time together; go out for fun; or run any other errands. During this time, Todd usually spends some good time playing with the kids, which they love. It’s not very structured, and allows us to just do whatever.
bedtime routine – as with our morning routine, I have an entire blog post on this, so I’ll save you the full details, but we tidy up, get ready for bed, and tuck in.
kids asleep – exactly when we’re finally ‘free’ depends on if Harry napped and when; how wired they were; etc. But once they are out, we only see them if one of them needs comfort. Harry usually needs 1-2 nurses (wide give or take here, depending on…everything) before I get to bed, and a change. The rest of the night, however, is typically open to whatever we want to do. Almost every night, this means some Crio Bru first. We love watching shows (we’ve made our way through most of every Star Trek), and YouTube videos together to reconnect, and have a laugh. Other days, we do our separate things either in the same room, or, very occasionally, separate. It all depends on what we want and need at the close of the day.
a lil treat 
yes, this is what we watch
Here’s a visual week that may be helpful:
As you work on crafting your days, I would suggest breaking down the segments of your day, then placing certain ‘musts’ (baby must nap, etc,) in first, and go from there. Google Sheets is a great resource for this.
This can be a challenge, but knowing what to expect and when things will happen makes such a huge difference. Our family has had the same schedule since around the end of July until the first week of December. It worked. Really well. After that, everything changed; but working on Christmas projects, and my mom coming to visit kept us flying by as best we could. Now, we are having to re-work our schedule, too. It can be daunting; but, as annoying as this sounds: writing this post gave me the exact advice I needed myself for figuring out how to get started with this. So I hope it’s done the same for you, too.
Good luck!
