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Prioritizing Family Habits

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November 18, 2011

As a mother of two boys, I’ve spent the last 8 years running.  Either chasing them, mothering them, or transporting them – and then attempting to squeeze my needs in between theirs.  I’m also a working parent with time consuming healthy habits that include working out, writing and cooking.  My passion has always been raising healthy kids, but my goal is also to the time and opportunity to be healthy and fit.  I’ve learned only recently how to balance a few of these things and am working towards having a super positive attitude 90% of the time.

As an active, healthy Fit Mom, my number one priority is for the family to sit down to a healthy dinner every night.   Most of the time, I can get dinner on the table in 30 minutes or less. By employing every shortcut in the book, such as frozen veggies, pre-cut veggie mixes, to simple dinners of a protein and a veggie, I get dinner on the table and we eat together.

Next, we’ve put a new emphasis on the Movie Night Friday in our house.  During the week, there is no TV, so we all look forward to Movie Night Friday night. Our current favorites are Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Princess Bride.  We cook up “old school” popcorn and real chocolate milk on the stove and have a little family party.

For us, Saturdays are the “down” days.  We’ve all been at school all week and find the unstructured parts of Saturday have the potential to get a little crazy.  I used to say, “let’s just stay at home” all day, but, it turns out that by 10AM my boys are jumping off the couches and doing forward rolls in the front room- not that this is bad, but, by changing my priorities on Saturday, we can have a lot more fun.  We get outside. The best parts of my weekends are our outside times on Saturdays, I love finding new hikes to take them on or new lakes to go visit.  In my local area, I have multiple choices for mountains, lakes or even the beach depending on how far I want to drive, but, the main objective is to get outside and play.

Finally, let’s talk about time.  Time is the one thing you can’t buy and to me it’s more important than money.  You can’t buy time back.  I also believe that both moms and dad need their own thing– or time away from the family to do what they love best.  It gives us all an opportunity to still be yourself even while we are still the {insert job title}, parent, spouse, etc…My husband is a cyclist and every Sunday morning, he’s off and riding and that’s his time.  For me, I like a little coffee shop/reading time to myself at some point during the weekend.  It sounds incredibly selfish to me even on paper but, it’s an hour or two to just do what I need most.  I always come home happier and ready to be a mommy again!

How do you keep yourself and your families priorities in check?

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