I often find myself wishing for a magic way to go back and observe a day in each year of my life. Really see how my days went, how I actually acted (could be frightening!), and probably appreciate it all a lot more in hindsight.
So with that in mind I thought I'd write about a 'typical' day in our house now.
On weekdays, usually Reed gets up on his own, otherwise we wake him up a few minutes after 7. I am not sure Amy's ever woken up on her own at 7 (maybe once in a blue moon), so usually we wake her up at 7. And then again at 7:10. And then again at 7:20.
I leave for work at 6:30 a.m. on the days that I go in to the office (Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays). So Tod's home with the kids, and usually they eat breakfast together and prepare for the day. On days when I telework (Wednesdays and Fridays), the kids eat by themselves since I start working (and doing laundry) at 7. Amy likes to get her lunch made and then leave a little early for the bus - right at 8. But Reed likes to wait until nearly the last possible moment to go to the bus stop, which is around the corner - usually at 8:05 on the dot, after he hastily throws his lunch together. (The bus is scheduled to come at 8:07, but amazingly he's never missed it.) Both kids have headphones on pretty much all the while, listening to who knows what.
The bus brings them back home around 3:45 p.m. Reed texts me to say he's home, if it's an office day. If it's a telework day, I'm usually on my way home when he texts, and I get home a little after 4.
Amy does homework if she's got it (Reed almost never has homework...a mystery we don't truly understand, but we don't question since his grades are great). The headphones are again glued to their ears (can you tell that frustrates me?). Both of them have to spend a half-hour outside doing something at least semi-active. Reed tosses the football to himself in the driveway, or sometimes on the trampoline (well he's back to that recently, after a long break). Amy hits tennis balls against the garage or sometimes shoots hoops. Amy is VERY careful to not spend one millisecond more than 30 minutes outside. If they end up outside at the same time, that's inevitably a recipe for disaster and fighting. Sometimes it seems they're still 3 and 5 years old, not 11 and 14.
Then it's back inside where Reed hides out in the living room probably having screen time when he's not supposed to (he very carefully keeps a pillow in his lap to try to keep up the illusion that he's not looking at his phone). Amy's usually at her desk, drawing or doing typing practice tests lately. Or if she can grab the living room couch, she'll be there drawing and listening to whatever she listens to. (There are frequent fights over the couch.) There they stay until dinner's ready. Phones are not allowed in their rooms, so unfortunately they don't want to spend a lot of time there. Tod usually gets home not too long before we eat dinner at 6.
Dinner. The food aspect can be a little fraught. I'm still struggling a little with making meals that work with Amy being vegetarian, and also trying to accommodate Reed's pickiness. It's a challenge. Reed will also complain if I get repetitive with serving his non-favored meals (which are many). Food aside, I think we have pretty good dinner times. Growing up, the TV was usually on during our family dinners, tuned to the Channel 9 news, waiting for the sports report with Glenn Brenner. But we never have the TV on until later in the evening. We talk about our days during dinner, sometimes talk about current events, we talk about what's on our upcoming calendar. Amy talks about Batman (well, more accurate to say she talks about Robin, her current obsession). Once in a while the kids really share things with us about their days or their studies.
After dinner, we're on an even (Amy) / odd (Reed) schedule for the dishes. There is much complaining when one or the other discovers the dishwasher needs to be unloaded (we usually only have to run it every couple of days, so that can be problematic with them switching off days). Their hand-washing skills still leave something to be desired, so we're still working on that. But mostly they've accepted their dish-doing fate and they don't complain as much as they used to.
Then it's on to the coveted screen time for the rest of the evening. Both kids on their separate computers (Amy has a laptop and Reed has a desktop). Reed plays Overwatch these days (a first person shooter game...blech) and I think he still plays Civilization sometimes. He hasn't been playing the X-box One in the basement for quite a while...guess he finally tired of Madden NFL. The super fantastic thing about online gaming is that Reed talks to his friends over the headphones....not loudly, but loud enough that it makes watching TV in the next room a little challenging. That's probably why some of his friends are allowed to have computers in their rooms (we're holding out on that one...too much temptation for gaming when he's not supposed to, and other possible shenanigans that I'm not even going to mention).
Amy is nearly always dual-screening....watching something on her phone, positioned just in front of her laptop, while she draws on the computer. She still doesn't like to share what she's drawn with us, unfortunately. I try not to push it, but I'd love to see what she's doing. I really miss the days when she wanted to show us every thing she'd drawn (and she's always been a prolific artist). Sometimes she watches TV in our room, since we're usually downstairs watching TV.
Yes I guess I should mention what Tod and I are doing in these evenings. Lately after dinner we've been taking Shelby for a 15 minute walk, enjoying the weirdly mild winter we've been having. Then since Tod's working on his Ph.D. through an online program, most days he does school work for an hour or two. I'm usually knee-deep in Facebook (such a time suck), or I edit photos, or watch TV, or read, or this time of year I do Girl Scout cookie business. I piddle around doing whatever it is I do. When Tod's done with school work, we watch TV together. These days it's the opening segments of Stephen Colbert and Seth Myers, or we watch "This is Us," or "The Daily Show" or some comedies. We don't really watch too terribly much TV, since we're usually in bed pretty close to 10.
Back to the kids...they're busy having way too much screen time. Amy showers a little before 9, and is supposed to be in bed at 9, but in the last few days she's taken to reading after she gets in bed, and deciding for herself that she'll go to bed a half-hour after her scheduled bed time. We've been just giving in on that one, because she's reading....she hasn't been doing all that much reading of late. She claims she takes forever to fall asleep, but we don't really know. Reed goes up to shower at 9:30, and the trouble we have is that because the kids' bathroom is right between their rooms, it's super loud in Amy's room so we've been letting Reed shower in our bathroom. Which ties our bathroom up for a half-hour, when frequently we find we'd like to have done our bedtime preparations before 10 and we find ourselves out of luck. We figure eventually he's going to want to shower in the mornings and we'll be rid of this problem. Their bedtimes are 9 p.m. for Amy and 10 p.m. for Reed, with a half-hour extra on weekends.
On weekends if we've got nothing going on, Reed's still usually up at 7:30 or 8. Amy, on the other hand, is our late sleeper. Sometimes even past 9:30 (I'm so jealous!). Then they're allowed to have 3 hours of screen time (WHY did we get in this terrible habit of allowing them so much screen time?!?). They're each supposed to spend at least an hour outside during the day. Amy, again, spends only exactly that much time, and not one second more. Reed gets more bored and will go outside several times a day. We recently had to forbid them from having their phones/headphones on during outside time, because it seemed every time we'd look outside, they'd be standing there fiddling with the phone.
Reed very much wants us to plan absolutely nothing for the weekends. Amy's a little more interested in leaving the house. Both of them have gotten really good about keeping an eye on our family calendar to know what's on the schedule, which is nice.
That's all I can think of. I'll see if Tod has anything to add. Wish I'd thought of doing this kind of documentation many years ago, I think even I will appreciate looking back at it!
