Less & More: The WFH Mom Edit

My Blueprint for Working Moms over the Summer has been a huge hit, so I thought I’d work one up for my FAVORITE season of all time – Fall. I know, I’m basic, but it’s got all the elements necessary to BE the best season: my birthday, my wedding anniversary, the best coffee drinks and a changing weather landscape that’s cool enough to bring your jeans back out but not so cold you hate your life when your feet touch the floor in the morning. I’m probably a bit late to the party here as some of my queens on TikTok have been celebrating fall since the 4th of July ended, but I’m the kind of basic fall girl that likes to wait a bit, enjoy the last days of summer (which, considering I live in the South and it’s going to be about 95 degrees today, are definitely still lingering) before I move on.

It may seem that because the kids are back in school, that we don’t NEED a blueprint. Just go on your merry way with all your free time, right? Wrong. At least for me. First, I just want to volunteer to share with the class that this year’s back to school season has seemed longer and more difficult than most for me. I talked about it more in this TikTok, but the basic gist is that we’re in two different schools (one of which is MIDDLE SCHOOL!?) AND new extracurriculars (I’m now officially a year round swim mom). So – things are just starting to settle into a rhythm around here and we’ve been back in school for two months.

But this happens every year, right? You JUST get into the swing of things and then the holidays start hitting and it’s mayhem all over again. So, here is my plan for making sure that things go smoothly from back to school to Halloween. Just a few systems that keep our “regular life” moving while deliberately making room for fall fun. And, because well, “LIFE” – it’s almost Halloween as it is. So bookmark this for next year! I know I learned some new things this year that will help with upcoming iterations of this time of year.

1. Get Into Your Weekly Rhythm

Put the boring logistics first. You have to make sure everyone’s school, homework, sports schedule is dialed in (especially if you have kid starting new schools, aka completely changing schedules!). Start by putting everything on the shared family calendar. Someday, I’d like to maybe have a Skylight or something similar, but for now, Dan and I have a shared Google Calendar. Here are the top priorities for this phase:

• Put school + activities on the calendar. Indicate which parent is responsible for driving in the invite so there’s never any confusion about who is supposed to be where. Include the address of the activity and any notes as reminders (ie: Ella actually has to be walked to the car from her theater class because it’s a new, more remote location down a dark hallway and rehearsal gets out after the sun goes down).
• Outline the crazy nights and actually talk through the best ways to handle them at a family meeting or in person at some point.
• Identify the nights you’re actually home (hopefully, you have at least one!) and ensure everyone understands what expectations that brings with regard to family dinners and screen time.
• Know which evenings can handle cooking vs. need something easy. Make sure to note this for your meal plans each week
• Do everything in your power to try to protect some unscheduled family time for your traditions/rituals, whether that’s family dinner, Pizza Fridays, Saturday movie nights, etc. It’s easy to let this stuff fall by the wayside, but I’ve been reading about how important these times of connection really are for the kids, especially as they get older, so try to establish them early on and don’t let them fall off because of scheduled extra curriculars!

2. Build an After-School System

When you have everything on the calendar, you might see that your “after school” time has gotten a little … hectic. I know we did. On swim days, we have about 30 minutes after arriving home from bus pickup before we have to head back out the door. Lists and plans are essential, and depending on what day it is, my kids have different lists to look at. We prioritize homework, chores, THEN free time. So the afternoon block includes any and all of the following components and responsibilities.

• Snack
• Homework
• Activities
• Backpack/lunchbox reset
• Pack for tomorrow
• Chores

I try REALLY hard not to micromanage because I want my kids to be independent, recognize what needs to be done and work on it in a way that feels good for them so that eventually, maybe, I won’t need to be involved at all. So for example, on Thursdays, I run Linus to swim while Ella has a little extra time to get ready before play rehearsal. We go over out loud what she HAS to get done and what time she needs to be ready to leave and then I allow her to prioritize as she needs to. If we run out of time or things get dropped, we have a conversation about what to do next time so that doesn’t happen. It’s not perfect, but we’re all learning!

3. Create a Fall Dinner Rotation

As I’ve mentioned before, I try not to recreate the wheel each week with dinner. At the start of each season, I pick out a bank of about 20 recipes that we will rotate through for a while until it starts getting REALLY boring. Other tips for saving time for cooking at this time of year?

• Grocery pickup. Order online (you can even save all the stuff you ALWAYS need to be automatically added) and then pickup. It saves a lot of time, and no roaming the aisles, getting tempted by all the new “fall stuff” either!
• Special dinner instructions go on the calendar. For example, if a slow cooker pot roast has to go in at 11am on a Tuesday, I put that in writing with a notification so I don’t forget.
• Sunday meal planning doubles as a great chance to review my calendar for the week.
• Easy meals on activity nights. We have leftovers every Thursday because that night is insane with activities.
• Cook-once/eat-twice whenever possible. I’ve even gotten in the groove of making SO much of something that we can freeze it for another time. We’ll be having defrosted leftover chili this week, in fact!

4. Keep the Kids Outside

We are lucky enough to live in a place where the weather is nice pretty much year round. Though, luck only had a LITTLE bit to do with it, because that’s half the reason we moved here from Chicago! In any event, I still try to get my kids outside a TON in the fall months for mood regulation, Vitamin D and stress relief (for them AND me!). Summer’s 300 Hours Outside challenge might be over, but outside time isn’t. After the homework and chores are complete on weeknights, we always get our kids to think about playing outside instead of sitting on a screen. They sleep AND feel better when they prioritize this. We do things like:

• Evening Family Walks with Waylon
• Bike Rides (my kids have this attachment for the hover board which they also love to ride in the evening)
• Play in the Backyard/creek with the neighbors (we put lights out there to help at this time of year)
• Impromptu bonfires in our fire pit

After spending hours in a classroom and/or theater and/or indoor pool – I always think of this time as them breaking free finally, haha!

5. Strike a balance with Fall “Stuff”

If you watch the inspo videos on social media, this time of year can feel like “buy $700 worth of seasonal decor.” I know I feel called to do that, ha! But I try instead to prioritize the kind of decor our family likes, and at this stage of life, I really try to let the kids participate and even lead a little. This year, Linus asked to put the Halloween decorations out in September. He did 85% of the work, so … win/win? He put stuff in places I wouldn’t have chosen, but it still looks great and I didn’t have to do it, so…

We also have a yearly tradition where each kid gets to pick a Halloween or Christmas decoration to add to our stash – they take turns (Dan is about to kill me because we’re running out of room to store all these!). But we also take time to evaluate the things that maybe don’t fit for us as well any more and donate/throw away items that aren’t in good condition or that we don’t love. This year, we donated almost ALL of our Halloween picture books to neighbors with younger kids. It was hard for me to let those go because I have been reading them to my kiddos since before Ella could talk, but when our neighbor stopped to thank us and share how much her daughter loved them, I knew we’d made the right choice.

Here are a few of the fall staples we look forward to every year that make us feel festive:

• Coffee Mugs for Me – I so look forward to breaking out my holiday mugs for my favorite morning ritual and actually, the kids like to join in with cups for water/smoothies as well.
• Fairy lights – orange on the piano, little ghost lights on the screened in porch, fairy light pumpkins on the mantel – just little touches of coziness
• Fall themed Blankets for movie night snuggles
• Cozy pajamas: I bought these Halloween Snoopy jammies from Aerie for Ella this fall and she adores them! Might need to actually order some for myself.
• Candles: this is a new obsession for Linus. He loves to light them on Sunday mornings and smell the pumpkiny goodness. Our go to is Yankee, of course.
• Seasonal movies: Hocus Pocus is an obvious fave, but we also like Hotel Transylvania, Halloweentown, Casper and The Nightmare Before Christmas. We just introduced the kids to Ghostbusters this year too!

Goal: Get everyone in the spirit for the runway to the holidays and romanticize life without spending our life savings on new “stuff” every year.

6. Protect Family Time

I mentioned this above, but as we have a middle schooler now with much higher social drive, it has come to my immediate attention how important these rituals and traditions have been that we’ve put in place and now continue to have. I see her choosing these things over texting (for now!). I see my kids light up when it’s time to pick the weekly family movie. Also – these things do NOT have to be a big deal. They just have to happen. Our favorite ongoing family time activities are:

• Family movie nights: we put all our names in a hat to decide who gets to pick each week.
• Weekend breakfasts – we do pancakes on Saturday and Linus has become the master of French Toast on Sunday mornings.
• Sunday Football games with graze boards/snack plates (mostly just me and Ella for this one at the moment cheering for the Panthers!)
• Game nights
• Walks
• Watching specific shows together that we all enjoy. Our current favorites are 99 to Beat, Home Improvement, Full House and Dinosaurs. We also all enjoy the occasional throwback with The Jetsons.
• Weeknight family dinners EVERY night except Thursdays (that schedule is just too insane). Someone cooks, we all talk about our days and then we all pitch in to clean up after. No screens (for anyone, not even the parents!), just connection for 30 minutes each day.

As the kids get older, I personally cherish these kinds of family time more and more because I KNOW how hard it is to get teenagers to spend time with their families. I’m hoping we can stay strong through those upcoming years as well.

7. Make a SMALL Fall Bucket List

We know we’re not going to be able to do it all, but between swim meets and Scout campouts, the fall weekends get eaten up pretty quickly. So we met as a family and made a small list of the activities we wanted to prioritize THIS year so we could put them on the calendar. It could be whatever your family likes, but here was our bucket list this year leading up to Thanksgiving:

• Carve Pumpkins
• Outdoor Movie Night
• Fall hike
• Stay in a Tree House
• Pumpkin carving
• Make Pumpkin Pie + Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream (inspired by this amazing custard place I frequented all the time in college – Ted Drewes!)
• Go to a pumpkin farm (this was universally agreed upon to be a lower level priority and as such, it actually did not happen)

This isn’t meant to create pressure to get things done, but more to keep the season from getting away from you. Last year, we were sitting around the day after Halloween, lamenting the fact that we hadn’t taken the time to carve pumpkins! This is how we avoid that.

8. Screen Time in the Fall

I know I’ve referenced tv shows and movies a decent amount in this post so far, but how do we actually handle screen time in the fall? Outside of our family movie night, each kid gets four poker chips per week, each one representing 15 minutes of screen time (same as in the summer!). If they have finished chores and homework and don’t have an activity to scramble to, they can cash in these chips for a show or some time on the iPad. To be honest, they don’t usually do too much of this during the week because there really isn’t TIME. Some weeks, they save up their screen time and then happen to have a surplus of it when they have a long weekend and they will cash in for an extra movie or some video game time.

The one wrinkle we’ve had this fall that I’m still working out is Ella’s screen time for texting/calling friends. On the one hand, I remember being in middle school and spending HOURS on the phone with friends, and I do believe the social connection is good. We have literally everything else turned off on the family iPad, so she’s truly using this time for socialization. But, it can get out of hand. I usually just limit it in the moment by yelling “five more minutes” when I feel she’s had enough. But it’s on my to do list to create a bit more structure around this kind of screentime. Right now the only established, universal rule is that it has to be off by 8pm (and it’s never allowed in anyone’s room).

9. The Sunday Fall Reset

I never STOP doing some form of a reset on Sunday, but it looks a little bit different each season. For the fall, I spend a little time every Sunday:

• Looking at the calendar for the week and touching base with Dan about anything that looks turbulent where our schedules collide.
• Meal planning, as above and then doing the grocery order.
• Checking in with the kids about their week and trying to instill this as a habit for them. What tests do you have this week? Big projects? Which nights are more free where you could spend a little more time doing homework? Write it all down!
• Tuning into my work calendar so that I’m not totally caught off guard on a Monday morning with meetings, deadlines, to dos.

It’s similar to the summer Sunday reset, but with a little more urgency!

10. The Pre-Holiday Buffer

his could be the thing that makes Fall Blueprint different from Summer Blueprint.

The holidays can be a big ball of stress for moms. ESPECIALLY if you also have a birthday to celebrate (like my December baby!). Around late October/early November, I try to start quietly getting ahead with things like:

• Holiday calendar outlines – not specific plans YET, but thinking about top pillars and even considering what we might want to say no to this year that we may have said yes to in years past (especially as the kids get older!)
• Gift list/budget – for instance, this year, we’re spending way less on gifts for our immediate family because we took that BIG trip to Universal over the summer. We’ve all discussed it and set expectations.
• Ella’s birthday (we don’t really do parties – we let the kids pick something “bigger” to do – last year, I took Ella and her friend to see Wicked on “Broadway” as an example)
• Reserve a turkey: we always host Thanksgiving, so I start menu planning in October.

I don’t want to start the holidays too early, but I DO want to arrive at Thanksgiving without immediately launching into holiday panic.

The Hope? That Systems Make Room for the Season

My hope in all of this is not to have everything managed and scheduled down to the last minute. It’s the opposite, actually. It’s to put scaffolding in place so that there is more room for the UNSCHEDULED stuff and the relaxation that we all really enjoy the most. I have always limited my kids to no more than two extra curricular activities at a time because I know that a lot of magic happens in the boredom, which they so rarely get to experience anymore. And as they have gotten older, I’ve honestly gotten MORE inclined in this direction (which is one reason I didn’t sign them up for camp this summer!). Just like me, they need down time to process and think and just … be. So if we can get some systems in place that match up with the demands of the season, hopefully, we can all enjoy some downtime in the cracks between.

Stay tuned for the updated HOLIDAY blueprint, where I desperately try to preserve this feeling through the holiday season, which I feel like I fail at almost every year. But maybe THIS year will be the year!