A morning in the life of this ADHD homeschool mom

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…

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! 

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

• 

  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.