Patterns

Generally, I've fallen into this pattern of writing my post before falling asleep. Once and a while, I get a couple of posts ahead and take a night off. However, most nights I'm here writing the blog post. It's started being ingrained as habit, which is a good thing. For example, our sleep cycle has become a little off. To make a long story short, I fell asleep early last night and didn't blog. This habitual writing has become so strong that I started awake at 2:30 AM with the realization that I didn't blog. So here I am at 3 AM. . . blogging.

That's the great side of habits, once set up, all I have to do is give in to the impulse. Of course that's also why bad habits are hard to break. Riding the power of habits, I'm trying to get several more in place:

1. 20 minutes to an hour working outside every afternoon. I've realized that I like outdoor chores but I let them pile up because of how busy we are. Solution? Do a little every day, bring Thomas with me. He toddles around while I pick at some small task, there are plenty of them after all. I tried it last week and it worked well for a few days. Now I just need to extend that. Rainy afternoons I figure I can do work in the basement.
2. Writing session in the mornings. 20 or 30 minutes to start, I think Now that I've established a good evening routine, it's time to add fiction writing into the mix. The blog has been great for establishing a daily writing routine, but ultimately there is other writing I want to do, and it's time to work on it.
3. A bedtime routine for Thomas, and therefore, for the rest of us too. Since Thomas was born, and before that really if I'm being honest, we've fallen into a rather indolent evening routine of eating and collapsing into the couch when we get home from teaching. We spend the whole evening zoned out on the tv/internet. Well, that really should change. It's largely accountable for why our weekends get so slammed which just compounds the tired/busy-ness problem. The problem is, I'm not quite sure what this one should look like. I'm thinking

• Food at the table
•  30 minutes to an hour of family reading time (Ryan and I can alternate who reads to Thomas and who gets personal reading)
• Play time
• Brush the Thomas teeth
• Thomas's bath
• Clutter pick up
• Then evening Thomas movie
• Then when he falls asleep we move him to the bedroom. The goal is to get him to bed down there, but he hasn't associated the room with sleep yet.

There's more I'd like to change, of course, but I feel like this is enough to take on for now. The challenge is that to establish a habit it takes several weeks to months of being rigid about the pattern until the habit establishes. As mentioned before, habits are hard to change. If we are creating new habits that invariably means breaking old ones. It'll take time and we'll probably have some false starts, but I think we can do this.