Cara Harvey 00:00:03 Welcome to the Purpose Driven Mom show here at A Purpose Driven Mom, we believe that it’s possible to manage your home, work on your personal goals, and grow and scale in online business. Most productivity tips out there tell you to hustle more and make you feel shame about not being motivated enough. And we’re here to dispel this myth. I’m Kara Harvey and I am on a mission to help work at home. Moms realize that they have the power to go after their dreams, take care of themselves, and manage their home without perfectionism, guilt, or having to sacrifice their sleep. If you’re ready to shift your thinking around productivity and get some practical tips to help you manage your mom life. Toss your earbuds in while you fold the laundry. And let’s do this! Welcome to the Purpose of My Mom Show. Episode 478.

Cara Harvey 00:00:47 And school has been back in session now for a little bit of time, depending on where you live. If you’re like some of my friends in the South, you’re like, girl, I’ve been back two months.

Cara Harvey 00:00:55 If you’re like me, it’s been a full month now, and if you’re like some of my friends on the East coast. It’s only been a few weeks, and I know one thing that has gotten completely thrown off and it’s my mornings. Now full transparency. I am recording this in July. I am trying to batch ahead because my kids have no camp in August, so I recorded everything for September when I had some quiet space. But I’m going into the future to tell you what I’m pretty sure is about to happen to me. And a lot of us will talk about how do you reclaim your mornings now that school is back in session? That school year energy. It’s wearing off, right? It’s wearing off and it’s wearing off hard on you and on the kids. You know, the I’m tired of this for lunch is beginning. I can’t find our shoes staying up later. Right. We were super strict, probably in the beginning with what time we’re going to bed and how we’re getting up and mornings are feeling chaotic.

Cara Harvey 00:01:47 If your mornings are feeling off track, like we’re just gonna do a reset today. Okay? We’re talking about how do you reclaim them for you? How do you reclaim them for the kids without putting pressure on yourself? As we’re about to transition into the last quarter of the year, which is bonkers. Can we talk about that for a second? You know, we talk about it in the club. How really we split our year for moms into trimesters, right? January to summer break, summer break and then start of school to winter break. And we’re in the last trimester. We’re moving into this place where it’s about to be even more chaotic because the holidays are coming. Not only are the holidays coming, everything is about to pile on. Activities have started back up, the paperwork is there, and now you have to get yourself ready for this part where homework is getting really hard, right? We talked about that last week. Homework is starting to get to be more for your kids academically.

Cara Harvey 00:02:42 They could be struggling at this point and everything is feeling thrown off, including your mornings, right? The excitement of the school year is done. Routines are not sticking as well as you hoped. Okay, it’s also challenging because you’re probably managing the multiple activities while maybe working from home like me, running a business, managing a household. And you may be solo in the mornings. Maybe your summer schedule is different. I know we have a couple club members. Their spouses are teachers, so their home in the summer. I used to be the same way. My husband was a principal. He was home in the summer. Now my husband’s back at work, right? So his the time I had in the morning where I had a second hand is gone. And maybe it’s like that for you right there. Busier. We’re getting up earlier and everyone’s a lot more tired because sports are in full swing activities. The mention of the homework, right. I know my daughter, she has cheer practice now, the team she’s on, it’s later than last year, so she’s got practice till 830 at night on Thursdays.

Cara Harvey 00:03:37 So she’s not even getting home settled and in the shower till almost 9:00. It’s making it much more challenging. You had the best intentions and I know you did. Oh, right. It’s like the start of a new year. When school starts, I’m going to get up in the morning and do my Bible study and read and work out and have quiet time. Maybe you did it for a couple days and it’s not working so well. If this sounds familiar. Just take a deep breath. Okay. It is normal and it’s fixable. We just are going to make some tweaks. Okay. Here are some signs that you’re ready to reclaim your morning. So I’m going to give you some things Journal through a little bit okay. You can pause. Ask yourself these questions. Really think through like what’s going on I always talk about the bookends the morning and the evening routine and how they’re the two most routines you make in your day. If I had to rank them, I would put evening routine first, because I think what you do at night sets up your morning and your day for success.

Cara Harvey 00:04:30 Right. So I want you to think about that, but also just know that, like those bookends, the reason I think they’re so important is because you are in control of the first thing you do in the morning and what you do directly before bed. Everything else in the middle is chaos. Most of the time, people need us. Our plans get thrown off. But the first bit of my day and the last bit of my day, I control even if my kids are up earlier than me, right? Which happens even if you have teenagers and they’re up later than you. What you choose to do, you can control. And so think through and ask yourself, is this what’s going on? Do I feel like I’m starting my day reactive instead of proactive? What I mean by this is, am I scrambling to find the shoes and the clothes and the lunches? Right? Am I hitting snooze a ton? Do I not have a plan for my mornings? Right? That’s that reactive? Or are you maybe a little more proactive? Where on my best days this is my intention.

Cara Harvey 00:05:27 Not always perfect, but what I try. I have found making lunch before I go to bed is a non-negotiable for me, because even though it doesn’t take me a ton of time to make lunch, not thinking about it and having one less thing to do is helpful. Backpacks packed. The only things we put in the backpacks in the morning are the Chromebooks, right? Because they’re charging overnight. Everything else? Snack ready to go. I know exactly what I’m doing in the morning. My workout clothes are set and ready. I have my plan for that as well. Okay. So what are you finding yourself? More reactive. More proactive? Are you feeling rushed behind or defeated by 9 a.m.? Now, sometimes it feels like this for me when it comes to work stuff. If I don’t have a plan by the time I drop my kids off, it’s. It is a whirlwind. I’m not going to pretend like my mornings aren’t a whirlwind. They’re just a little bit of organized chaos, right? I jam it a lot between 6 and 9 a.m. that’s when I tend to get up.

Cara Harvey 00:06:18 I really do want to try to get up a little bit earlier, but I find in my perimenopause age that I need that seven hours. So if I get to bed by 11, what is that? 12 123456. Yep. 11 to 6. That’s like what I need to feel like. Pretty good moving in. So I either need to go to bed earlier or it’s not going to happen. But I get a lot in there. Okay. So between 6 and 9 I’m reading, I’m doing my workout, I’m balancing my bank account, I’m getting everyone ready for school, I’m showering, I’m unloading the dishes, I’m listening to my Bible study, and then we’re out the door. I have a couple other things in there I call my picture due to my Duolingo. Like I’m shoving a lot of stuff in there. Okay, so by the time I start work at 9 a.m., I often feel unsettled is probably the best word, right? Like, I finally dropped the kids off at school and I have to decide, I don’t know, my kids could walk to school without me.

Cara Harvey 00:07:10 They could. They’re not here, so I can admit it out loud. My daughter will walk home from school often. They have three incredible. I love our crossing guards. They are so kind, so nice. They always look for her when she does because sometimes she’ll do before school activities. This year in particular, she’s going to pick up a couple close quarters of before school activity. She can do it. My kids are in second and fourth grade. Like they can do it. I just don’t want to. I just don’t want to let them do it. I want to take them. I want to be there. So maybe some mornings I will. I think that’s one thing. If I challenge myself and like my son, I don’t. Oh, I don’t know. I’m not ready for my daughter. If it was just her, I would probably let her take yourself to school. Also, it’s like when I get to be social, so I don’t know. But for my son, no.

Cara Harvey 00:07:51 So I sit down, I get them dropped off, and that’s when I make my breakfast and start my day. I’m already feeling like this heavy weight. If I don’t plan my days in advance, which we’ll talk about, right? Are you yelling? Scrambling? Is it chaos? Are you always trying to find the shoes? One of the things I notice in reflection. Always when I teach something, we’re starting in reflection, right? But in reflection, one of the struggles we have with our morning routine is getting my daughter up. That back to school excitement I mentioned. It was exciting. Or it will be again. I’m projecting in the future, but I know my kid. She was going to be excited for a couple days to get up and put on her new jewelry. We might get her ears pierced in the next couple weeks. She had like a keloid on the back of her ear, and I found this stuff on the TikTok shop that’s like shrinking it, which is amazing. So once it gets shrunk, I told her before cheer season comp season starts, we can probably get her ears pierced, but she’s probably going to pick out jewelry in her.

Cara Harvey 00:08:41 She’s at that age right where she, like, wants to take more time to get ready. I’m sure that’s ended. I’m sure at this point I’m get up. It’s time to get up. It’s time to get up. Right? And then we got to do her hair and I still do her hair, which I need to transition this year. This is one of the things that I think I’m going to focus on in August as I prepare for my my back to school season is like her doing her own hair, because that will save me time and she needs to learn how to do it. She did it while she was at camp. It’s like, it’s not that she can’t, but she needs to learn it. And then ask yourself also, are you skipping your personal time to get everybody else ready in the morning? Do you have all the best intentions of doing this thing for you and then you don’t get it done? All right, I want you to do a quick morning audit based on these questions, okay? And then ask yourself, what is one thing that is not working out right now in my mornings? And I think that’s going to help us get started with making a plan, because it’s one thing to say like, oh my gosh, our mornings are terrible, our morning goals are stressful, I can’t get anything done.

Cara Harvey 00:09:35 It’s another to actually pinpoint, like, what is it about the morning? What is it right now? What actually just isn’t working in this moment? We don’t want to catastrophes and say everything is awful, everything’s terrible, nothing is working. So I want you to audit through. Okay, look at your signs and ask yourself, what is it exactly that feels off to me, and how can I pull that back in again? This episode is intentionally going out at the end of September because you’ve been trying whatever you’ve been trying for the past month, and I bet some of it is stuck.

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Cara Harvey 00:10:49 We did some new things over the summer to reset some routines that have worked really well, and I’m hoping that they’ll stick when school starts, but I’m betting also that some of them aren’t. Okay, so let’s analyze that and then we’ll get to some tips. We’re now going to give you some great strategies that are going to help. I want them to be doable and grace filled because we are imperfect people trying to do our best. So I’m going to give you a couple things that I want you to focus on and choose the ones that you think will help you the best and get you going. Okay, first things first is I want you to reset your expectations. You don’t need a perfect morning, right? You just need one that feels a little bit better. You’re aiming for progress. Not 5 a.m. miracle morning.

Cara Harvey 00:11:31 And listen, I’ve read the 5 a.m. miracle. I like how Elrod. I like the book, but as I’ve mentioned, 5 a.m. doesn’t always happen for me. And maybe not for you, right? Depending on what time your kids are going to bed, what your morning looks like. We are a tired people. Us moms, right? And sometimes 5 a.m. is a struggle, so don’t feel like you have to get up at five to make everything work. But ask yourself, am I using the time wisely? It’s one thing to give yourself an unrealistic expectation of, I’m going to get up at 4 a.m. and go to like I used it when I was teaching. I don’t know. I mean, I know how I do it, I was in my 20s, but like, I would get up at 4 a.m., get my morning workout in and have enough time to shower. And it was a long workout. This was like an hour at least of a workout before. Like now I get a half hour or 40 minutes most and then I’m out, right? Like I was doing at least an hour a day, getting my workout and showering, getting to school early like I would get.

Cara Harvey 00:12:24 I taught high school, so like, I feel like I can’t remember exactly when the kid started, but it was I had to be there by 730, so I and I would always get there early, come home, do a second workout. Right. Like the pre kid’s 20s. Right. Well, now things are just different for me. But I do want to ask myself, can I challenge myself to get up earlier so that I can fit things in? Because if my expectation is that I’m going to fit in a 12 step morning routine in 30 minutes, because all I’ve done is hit snooze. I need to call myself out a little bit, but if my expectation is these are the three things I would like to get done in the morning for me. I want to work out. I want to do a little bit of reading, and I want to listen to my my Bible study while I get ready. Like I time and I want to take a shower. I would say shower is like my three.

Cara Harvey 00:13:07 Like I like to be ready to go by the time I drop the kids off. Like, and I mean, you see me if you’re watching on YouTube, this is what I look like every day. I don’t put on a ton of makeup. I mean, I do put on makeup, but I don’t like I can get ready in like 20, 30 minutes if I’m showering and taking a little bit extra time to dry off. Right. Like I can get ready very fast because I’m pretty low maintenance, right? So I want to shower, I want to work out, and I want to do some reading in the morning. I’m not setting this unrealistic expectation that I’m going to do everything on my list in the morning. Now, I am adjusting my schedule a little bit to get some extra work in. Now that I have like a different work opportunity on my plate. So maybe I will start getting up earlier. But again, I have to then make the expectation that I’m going to go to bed earlier as well to make it work.

Cara Harvey 00:13:49 I also want you to start your evening routine the night before. Okay. Simplify and batch out the chaos. This is my top tip of making mornings feel easy is to close up shop at night. Write the closing shift where you’re cleaning up. The dishes are done. 15 minute pickup. We haven’t been doing it so well in the summer, so I’m reclaiming that for us as well. Like even and this is where it’s hard. And I talked about this in a past episode I think, or recently on something. I talked about this on a clip reclaiming our spaces, because right now my kids are in creation mode because it’s summer and they’re doing all their things. But when school starts, it’s like, I need the table back. We cannot end the day. Like maybe obviously if I get it, I like right now for real on my kitchen table is some sort of lawn trimmer that my husband’s been fixing for like ten days. Completely undone. Dirt, grass, screwdrivers. just sitting there.

Cara Harvey 00:14:47 It’s in there like we can have. It’ll get moved. It’ll get moved. There’s a half done Lego that my son’s been working on. And then all over my house as of this morning is cardboard. Now we save a lot of cardboard for the fire pit in the summer, so I pretty much just have, like, a bin of cardboard all the time. But my kids are cardboard kids. We got these really cool cardboard cutters on Amazon for them for like a birthday or Christmas morning, because they’re thicker than regular scissors. And they were like trying to cut everything. Scissors. My kids are cardboard kids and my daughter’s building an lol village for her lol. So now this girl has the nice pretty expensive lol house like she got it two, maybe even three years ago for her birthday. I love that she still plays with them, but she loves to build her own so she’s got. So my my walking from my office to my kitchen, she didn’t finish. So there’s just cardboard everywhere, right? Like just cardboard and cutouts and dolls like it is wild.

Cara Harvey 00:15:41 And I went out last night to do a couple of things I didn’t get home to like nine by the time we got ready for bed, I was like, I didn’t have the energy to be like, please clean this up. It was fine. I’ll let her do it. But when the school year starts, we can’t. We can’t live like that, like I, I will stress me out. So it’s like we have to do our pickup. We have to pack the lunches, pick out the clothes the night before, we pick out five days worth of clothes. We put them in a little organizer in my kids room on Sundays. I started this when my daughter was four and it has worked. She’s almost ten, right? She’ll be, oh my gosh, she’ll be ten. Gosh, she’ll be ten in December. I would rather fight with her once a week about what to wear than every morning. Right. So on Sundays we take a little bit of time. Match, match, match.

Cara Harvey 00:16:21 Put it in a thing. My son doesn’t care, but he can pull it out this way. I know we have enough clean clothes. You can dress yourself. It’s cool. Ready to go? All right, so help yourself out the night before. I’m telling you what, the lunches. It really does save time in the morning. And then also set the stuff out that you want for your morning routine. If you want to read, if you want to work out, put those things out. Put them aside so that you have them.

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Cara Harvey 00:17:44 I also want you to pick a morning anchor. One thing. Right. Speaking of setting things out. One thing for you. It is not an hour long routine. It is a 15 minute, one line of day journal. Coffee in silence. A little bit of a prayer. Reading your book, right? It is something you do that starts your day, that you do before you pick up your phone. So set it up in your room. Now, obviously having your own coffee like you like, I don’t don’t have a coffee machine in my bedroom, but maybe that’s not a bad idea. Like, I would take my coffee and then go sit outside with it.

Cara Harvey 00:18:17 But for me, I want to do that in my room. But now the first thing I tend to do in the morning is involving my phone. Like, once I’m out of bed, I go through. I call my photos. So I search for the date September 15th. I search that date in my phones. I go through my memories on my Facebook. I delete photos, and then I do my Duolingo. That whole thing takes like a little bit of time. I do it while I’m drinking my pre-workout. It tends to be the first thing, but it has me going to the phone. And so one of the changes I’m going to make in September is doing something in my bed, which is my reading. So when I get up in the morning, I’m going to do my reading instead of waiting to do it, because that’s when it gets pushed off, because then I start picking up my phone and I get distracted and I’m scrolling. Okay, pick an anchor. That’s for you.

Cara Harvey 00:18:58 Because no matter what happens after that, at least you could have spent five, ten, or 15 minutes doing something for you, which is going to help you feel more taken care of and more centered. I also want you to keep it simple, okay? Simplify your life. Now, one of the things I need to redo back it up. I would like to redo. I don’t need to, but I would like to redo is our like quote unquote like mudroom area which we don’t have. So we don’t have a mud room, I don’t have a garage. So we have one of those like hulks where jackets are hung that I got from Teemu like a year and a half ago. And that thing is breaking, right? We have one of those. When you first walk in the house, it isn’t strong enough. It’s got like a shoe rack, but it isn’t strong enough for book bags. So I actually saw something on TikTok that I want to try. Where you use a cube organizer, but I have to make sure I can find the right cube organizer because the first one was larger to fit a book bag, and the bottom one is smaller to fit drawers.

Cara Harvey 00:19:54 Now I have ones that I can use somewhere in the house that fit the drawers, but I kind of look for a longer one because what this person did was they took the hooks, command strips, put them inside the cube for the book bag, and then all the sneakers go in the bins. That way you know where everything is. So have a command center, a place for shoes, a place for book bags, a place for charging the Chromebooks. Make sure they’re all together. This will make it easy to find, to pack, and to keep it organized. Keep your breakfast options simple as well. Keep them as simple as possible. We have few options for my kids. I love to pick what they want. They don’t need the same thing for breakfast because they don’t like the same thing. I want them to eat breakfast so they get a couple choices that are easy for either me to grab for them or they can grab themselves. My son, he likes pancakes. He likes scrambled eggs.

Cara Harvey 00:20:44 Or he likes a little, like breakfast charcuterie plate that my husband made him once. And so it’s cute. It’s like two hard boiled eggs. He doesn’t like the yolk. My son loves hard boiled eggs, but he doesn’t like yolk. So two hard boiled eggs. We started making them with meatballs. Just honestly, we didn’t have sausage like frozen breakfast sausage, but we had to think of frozen meatballs and I tried to stretch my budget. So I was like, let’s try it with these. So he eats whatever. Who cares what you’re eating, right? It’s not real. Like breakfast is just a time we made up. So if he wants meatballs in the morning, I’ll let him have his meatballs. But they go in the middle for eyes. Then strawberries cut up for the smile. And I can’t remember what he likes for the nose. Pickles. I think whatever. He’s got some easy options that he likes. I make and batch out the pancakes along with my daughter’s waffles over the weekend.

Cara Harvey 00:21:33 I make them and I just keep them in the freezer so he can put them in the toaster or the microwave himself. Or I can make them. He tends to be up before me, so I let him, you know, make his own thing. And he has those three options. So I’ll be like, what would you like? You get one of those three or yogurt or yogurt. It’s always an option. My daughter similar yogurt cereal. If I have sourdough cooked. She likes sourdough with some jelly or waffles. Okay. Those are her eggs. Like, she’s got a couple options she likes. So while I’m dragging her out of bed, I will say, which would you like for breakfast? And then she will tell me based on what she feels like eating that day. It’s not like dinner is what we eat, but like, breakfast, like I want you to eat. So let’s. You can have some autonomy there. But it’s still simple. I keep it very predictable so that I don’t have to think about it.

Cara Harvey 00:22:20 I can meal prep easy and we go from there. I also want to encourage you to use a visual chart. Okay. Offload remembering the steps and let the chart do the reminding. This is a game changer in my home, especially in the mornings. My kids cannot have tech until their chart is done. Just that’s it. And on their chart includes eating breakfast, cleaning up your breakfast, getting dressed and brushing your teeth. Those are the four things they need to do in the morning. They don’t take them long. They’re not that hard. And as soon as they’re done with those, they can have tech. My daughter, she’s a slow mover. She likes to get up and put on her robe and do her whatever. My son wants to watch TV so he will get up and do his entire morning routine in like 15 minutes. And then because he’s up so early, he gets like an hour to two of TV in the morning. I do not actually care. Right. But he has to do those things before he puts the TV on.

Cara Harvey 00:23:11 And that has been something we’ve kept all year, something that works in the summer, and we’re slipping a little with it now. So I’m going to bring it back in in the summer. But I don’t know. All I have to say is. Just look at your chart. It took a while to teach it, but now they know what they’re supposed to do. It’s predictable. And again, give them some sort of incentive. A reward for my kids. It’s tech. Sure. Go ahead. You can watch TV or play on your tablet. My kids get an hour a day on their tablet when they choose to use it. It is up to them, obviously, after their morning routine and that helps. And my last tip today is to create a grace buffer build in 10 or 15 minutes of flex time in your morning so that you can model for your kids that like, we’re running late, but we don’t have to lose our minds because the second we start freaking out, our nervous system raises, their nervous system raises, and everyone is miserable.

Cara Harvey 00:23:58 So intentionally do things that give you a little bit of space. Maybe there’s something you have to take out of your morning. Maybe by moving lunches to the evening, you’ve now given yourself a buffer. All right. You do not have to be stressed and freaked out, because it’s going to show them that running late means we have to be worried. All right. I know that it’s September. I know you’re like, yes, school. Give me tips, whatever. But the mornings matter and all that excitement is gone. So what are you going to do with your mornings as you go into the rest of this year and close it out? Okay? Don’t start things over. Just start from where you are and choose one small thing this week and stack it there. Shownotes are at a purpose driven romcom podcast for 78. Gosh, that means we’re going to be at 500. Before we know it, please share, write, and review the podcast. I really appreciate it. And if you need any help, I’m over at a Purpose Driven Mom on all the channels.

Cara Harvey 00:24:52 Have a great one!

Cara Harvey 00:24:57 Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Purpose Driven Mom Show. If this episode served you in any way, we would really appreciate it if you headed over to wherever you listen to podcast, hit that five star and leave a review and a rating that’s home where moms can find us and we can grow our community. If you had a tip or an Make sure you come over and tag me at a Purpose Driven Mom on Instagram and share it with your friends. The best way for us to get this message out there of less hustle and less shame and more intentionality, is for you to share it with people you know need to hear it. Thanks for listening. We appreciate you and I can’t wait to connect with you more outside of the podcast.