Bedtime
I've always struggled to balance routine and whimsy. When I was a first-time mom, I learned the importance of routine. Creating a predictable schedule for my firstborn baby was the best way for me to build trust with her while giving me a break from my new forever job. Knowing that I would have my own time to veg and decompress from the day around 8pm was a gift. Once Zadie was born, we had competing schedules to maintain, and there went all the healthy routines I had created for us.
In the last email she sent to our January cohort of SHMOMS, Kat, our program facilitator and a '21 alumna, said, "Keep the things you feel are important front and center in your daily routines and lives–walking, reading, family movie nights, and displaying resourcefulness for your kids to pick up... It will sometimes feel very natural to create routines and traditions and other times it may feel uncomfortable as we step into new roles and navigate lots of opinions. Just remember you are in the center of it all." And that really resonated with me, a mom who has created and abandoned routines for herself and her family over the last 12 years.
Zadie turned 9 this week and we celebrated her with ice cream cake (a Larsen birthday tradition), friends, and fun.
When I was facilitating SHMOMS, we talked about how systems and routines are good. They're not just for kids. They help regulate us as well. But the water signs among us, of which I am one, may not want to feel fixed by a routine that doesn't allow them to live with spontaneity and that good old whimsy. The routine can feel like jail.
Despite this resistance, I've recognized the necessity of structure. I've spent the last couple of years challenging my aversion to routine and meditating on the concept that systems work actually creates freedom. When I create systems in my home and work life, there are steps that everyone can follow to keep order, which results in less being asked of me.
Now that we have three kids, bedtimes haven't gotten any better. Everyone is at a different level of tiredness, and each child has a different amount of homework and after-school activity, which results in a less-than-smooth end to the day just about every day. I've been thinking about one thing that we can do in the evening that helps us all get ready for bed. Nick and I have our own routines where, after we yell at the children to just go to sleep, we watch a show together, but we definitely need a collective wind-down action.
A friend recently shared that before bed, she has been doing a lymphatic drainage exercise where she raises her legs against a wall for 20 minutes to calm her nervous system. As she shared this new routine she's adopted, I daydreamed about the idea of us doing this exercise as a family 15 minutes before bed. You know how children always want to tell you their stories from the day as soon as they hit the pillow and you're ready for them to go to sleep already? What if we simulated that head-on-pillow experience by doing this exercise all while draining our lymph nodes and regulating our nervous systems? Let me dream.
I went to the Cherry Bombe Jubilee 2025 yesterday and literally could only muster my daily uniform, a different kind of routine, because I was so tired from celebrating Zadie’s bday the day before.
If you've been reading my emails for a while, you know I am big on having our weekly family meeting. We started having this meeting a couple of years ago to create a line of communication between the adults and between the children and adults. Don't be confused though. This meeting has had starts and stops depending on how overprogrammed we are with extracurricular evening activities, but know that I'm no longer the only person in this house making sure we have that meeting. Our newly minted nine-year-old helps keep us on track. Having the meeting feels good because she has come to expect it.
Routines between children and their adults create safety and stability. This past weekend I witnessed how one working mother's routine of making dinner for her family every night despite her exhaustion helped her now-adult daughter launch a whole career around helping all of us cook when we don't feel like cooking. This transformation from daily habit to a tradition that has created a path for a big career illustrates a powerful truth. Committing to one action that has a domino effect on the rest of your day or week can be so powerful for yourself and/or your family.
At the root of this book is one working mother’s commitment to preserve a tradition of eating dinner with her family. Her daughter has turned that beautiful tradition into making dinner more accessible for all of us whether we’re mothers or not.
Sometimes we get overwhelmed by all of the things that we should be doing, whether that's waking up at five in the morning or working out before the day gets started or eating more vegetables. Whatever those "shoulds" are that are cluttering your thoughts... what if you just committed to one of them, just one thing that connected you to some bigger result in your life?
It's hard for me to think about adding another daily task to our collective schedules, so I'm resting in the fact that our family meeting is alive and well. Maybe if I start doing this lymphatic drainage exercise alone, the kids and maybe even my husband would want to do it with me. And hey, you never know… maybe this would lead to a whole new routine that helps us all get our sleep and quiet time a little more seamlessly. But, I know that any chance of this happening will have to start with me and my commitment to doing it. For now, in my commitment to choosing simpler paths instead of more complicated ones, committing to our one weekly collective action is all I can bear and I trust it will have a lasting impact on our kids simply because it's the one thing we have committed to. Consistency always yields compounding results.
With you in the freedom that routines create,
Petrushka
Your Local Ice Cream Lady & Life/Business Coach