(Stuff Jo Made) - Pinterest Hack Success

 

I have tried a few different techniques to help develop the Bean's sense of time, and thus time management, particularly when it has come to Quiet Time and bedtime. For Quiet Time, we have very successfully used the Time Timer, set to the full hour. This is the one time each day that the Bean reliably plays alone. Quiet Time is essential at our household, once the naps were old news, mostly for ME!

When we transitioned from Spring into Summer, the Bean wasn't sleeping in like we wanted her to. So we used a digital clock and told her she couldn't come wake us up until the first number was a 7 or 8 (I also posted a notecard with the numbers written on them so she could simply match the numbers). I don't know whether this little trick worked, or we simply adjusted to both Alex and me not working and we were all rockstars at sleeping in.

Most recently I stole an idea from Pinterest to aid our bedtime routine, with the hopes of reducing the nightly power struggles. As you can see from the pictures, I bought a cheap analogue clock from Target and colored the hours between 5 and 8 p.m. different colors. According to the colors, I also made a pictorial schedule to accompany the clock. In pink, the hour from 5 to 6 p.m. is our "get home from work, unpack, settle in and maybe play a little bit" time. We usually start our dinner cooking/eating around 6 p.m., as shown in green. And the purple section is for bath, PJ's, teeth, and books. The goal is for me to be all done by 8 p.m., as I'd love to "clock out" on the parenting deal for a bit each day (as if that's even a realistic idea). Most nights I am still in her room/bed when "the short hand is out of the purple," as I lay with her to fall asleep anywhere from 5 to 35 minutes. So this Pinterest hack is certainly not fool-proof, but if nothing else, it empowers Francie with some sense of understanding time; we can tell her to look for the short hand and to judge where in the purple color it is, giving her a sense of how much longer she has with her parents' devoted attention (and last bit of patience!). I should color that 8 to 9 p.m. hour orange, to show her that is when we turn into pumpkins!