A morning in the life of this ADHD homeschool mom

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I just stumbled upon this blog post that I wrote last year but never finished and published. Our mornings have changed quite a bit since I wrote this (and never finished it) but I thought it was pretty interesting so I figured I’d post it anyway as a record of our life back in 2018…


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PJ, bed-head me…sitting at my laptop, writing this post

So this morning I woke up thinking…we do “A Day in the Life” interviews on the Savvy Homeschool Moms podcast…and those have been the most popular interviews we do…plus we have repeatedly gotten comments from listeners saying that they love that aspect about our show, too, because we let listeners take a peek into our homeschool lives…People tell us they LIKE this, and they LIKE getting to know us! Just got a comment recently saying exactly this!

Then I was thinking that I don’t always do that here on my blog…and why is that? Because my ADHD brain goes a zillion miles a minute constantly and I write about whatever is currently on my mind. And that usually isn’t my daily living.

But today…today that IS my daily life! So today, I will let y’all take a peek at my current morning routine, such as it is. Because, being the ADHD person that I am, it has taken me a LOT of work to get to the point where I actually have a morning routine…and I’m pretty proud of how it’s going these days, in the scheme of things! 

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The laptop, at the desk, I’m sitting at, writing this post…

It’s not perfect, by any means…and next I need to work on afternoons…but my mornings usually have the majority at least MOSTLY routine. Though it only takes something very small….like deciding to sit down and write this blog post, LOL!! to throw it off… So I’m going to attempt to do this in pieces here and there so I don’t throw off my morning! Notice I said “attempt.” But I have learned that if I want to make good content for my blog, I have to do it when the mood hits….and it’s hitting me NOW. So I pay attention to that.

SOOOOO…here goes…MY ADHD homeschool morning!!


MY MORNINGS…


  • Wake up, fairly early (thank you, perimenopause), around 7 or 8…check Facebook and email in bed for a bit then head to brush my teeth, yada yada…
  • Usually my kids are stirring around the same time. It varies a bit, morning to morning, but

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FEED ME!!!

not by much…and I am usually ruled by my elderly kitty (19 years old!) that is DEMANDING LOUDLY to be fed.
“I’m up! I’m up!! I’m coming, Old Lady!!” 
Or sometimes I hear from the other part of the house “Moooooooom!! Henna wants to be fed!!!!”   Yeah, no duh! That’s how she rolls these days since she has been put on a special diet since her kidneys started shutting down. FEED ME!!! is how she spends her day….when she’s not sleeping.

  • Into the kitchen to feed the cranky old cat her canned

  • D250AAE3 40BA 47D5 977F 2DC22FBEAC78
    No seriously…put down the friggin camera and FEED ME NOW!!!

    food…letting the kittens out of their room on the way (they would keep us awake all night long if we left them out), careful to not let them into the kitchen because they will eat Henna’s food, and we think Gizmo is food sensitive so HE is also on a special diet. Plus he’s MEAN to Henna and has to be watched near her because he hisses and swats at her. Damn youngster! Respect your elders!

  • Add fiber to elderly cat’s kidney diet because she also gets constipated, and start the food game of putting it down for her to eat a few bites and stare up at me like she wants something different or there’s something wrong with it. Show her her food again…”Oh! Food! Yum!” Eat some

  • 0C672023 CADC 4858 A93E 7F5E09EFBFC4
    Henna’s spot

    more….look up at me again and walk away for awhile when I don’t respond. But come back again in like 10 min and demand to be fed again. Sigh. We go through this every.day. I think she’s senile or something. I can pick the food up, pretend to do something with it and put it back down and she starts chowing again, LOL!  Plus she is super picky about her food…whatever…she’s the equivalent of like a 90 year old human, so I try to make her happy. She won’t be with us much longer. Eventually she waddles back to her spot in the sun where she sleeps all day and we are done until a few hours later when she’ll be back meowing loudly to be fed again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

  • NEXT I try to do all of the following, in no particular order: take all my meds, dole out meds and vitamins to the appropriate kiddos, open all the curtains in the house so we no longer look like we are living in a cave (windows too for fresh air, if the weather is nice), start some breakfast, start some dishes, boot up my laptop, refill cat water, scoop cat box (often forget or delay til later), add things to our shopping list on the fridge, pick up things I see every step of the way that need to be put away/closed/thrown away/moved/cleaned up/etc…because, well, I’m a mom and that’s what we do…  AND usually I get distracted. A LOT. Kids need me, cats are doing something they shouldn’t (have I mentioned we have FOUR??) something shiny grabs my attention, something occurs to me that I should start working on (like this blog post)…or something spills or a cat vomits or someone has technical issues on some device that HAS to be handled immediately…you know the drill….
  • At some point my son will ask to be given time on the computer (he has to ask…I have a program that won’t let him on unless I add time)…”Did you brush your teeth?” “No” (even though there’s a sign by his bed to remind him AND a sign right on the keyboard to remind him…I still usually have to remind him…sigh…hence the requirement of him asking to put the time on. “Go brush your teeth and then I will add an hour.” OR, he wants to watch something on tv…which I recently ALSO got a device, a smart device that works like a timer for lamps that I can control from an app on my phone. He has to ask to watch tv and I can ask him if he’s accomplished whatever it is that he was supposed to have accomplished before I set x amount of time that he can watch…works like a charm. No more fighting to get him off. It shuts off when time is up. Wish I didn’t have to lock everything down, but we had BATTLES before…and I’m so done. Now I have a way to make sure he gets stuff done before he gets screen time. PS4 also just updated and added a timer (which I can also control from an app) so I’m one HAPPY mama!
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    The next part I’m not so good at, but I’m trying to make it a part of my morning…Checking my morning routine on Trello. I made a morning routine on Trello to help me establish the routine that I want…and I’m still working on it…because I still can’t seem to remember to check Trello every morning. But when I do, it helps me to remember the other things I want to do each morning, like update my websites and check my email to keep my inbox empty. As soon as I complete an item, I move it over to the “done” board.
  • One of the things on my Trello list is to check Homeschool Planet for the day’s schedule. This is another thing I’m still working on making a habit. But it’s sure handy when I do remember to do it. I have things all organized on there that I want my kids to accomplish in their homeschool day. I can even add non-homeschool things to the plan, but right now I’ve chosen to not clutter it up that much…I’m having a hard enough time as it is!
  • Usually by the time I start working my way through about half of my Trello list, it’s time to start thinking about lunch…time flies! Seriously, WHERE does all the time go??  Also, I’ve usually already had numerous fights with my son to get working on his to do list…I have tried SO.MANY different ways to handle things with him, and nothing seems to work…at least consistently. So each day I pretty much have to try something different with my soon to be teenager (turns 13 this summer, YIKES!) It just depends on how he’s feeling and how I’m feeling. Even being consistent with him doesn’t seem to work. It’s all a fight. I know many of you can relate. Looking forward to getting through this phase…
    • once
      So, lunch…during which we often will watch an episode of our favorite show (currently), Once Upon a Time…Seriously amazing show! And we can discuss the way the fairy tales and stories have been changed in this show…although mostly we just enjoy the show, and talk about why we like it and what we think will happen next, and why characters have done what they did…mind-blowing how good this show is.

    And that ends our morning…afternoons are never the same…we have yet to establish any sort of routine…hence me focusing on our morning routine in this post. And afternoons are when we do our “school work”…which is ever changing. We don’t start until after lunch, and then we do whatever feels right that day, there really isn’t a whole lot of routine. Except math for my son…I am trying really hard to make sure he does his Teaching Textbooks lessons daily. He also practices drum (he takes weekly lessons, so that’s important to practice daily), and I try to have my daughter do her Dave Ramsey Personal Finance lesson daily as well…though that doesn’t always happen. But she’s been doing really well with it and is nearly finished, so I’m not super concerned. It’s a FABULOUS curriculum, by the way!

    Sprinkled into the mix, we do Brave Writer lessons when the mood suits, and Poetry Teatimes (Although ours are usually more like “Reading Teatimes”since we don’t care so much for poetry.)…and we watch Amazing Race as a family and learn geography and world cultures via the country report and Noodle Homeschool lessons I create… (Now renamed Tina’s Learning Adventures, with a shiny new website that is still under construction!)


    That’s as far as I wrote on this last year…I don’t really feel like finishing it up now that so much time has gone by. But it’s still pretty interesting, I think.

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    1 Comment

    1. sister. I feel you. there are far too many shiny things in life. loved this post –

      signed,
      18+ years homeschooling ADHD momma

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