Hey there,
Are you starting to feel the tug of school on the calendar? I certainly am!
Let’s not hide from reality. I’ve got two great tips for kicking off the school year strong.
1. Let’s (not?) Do Lunch!
Who makes your child’s lunch for school? And more importantly, do you love your system or hate it?
Making school lunches (and cleaning up from them) was a task I always hated doing. So in the spirit of raising independent kids, this lunch lady quit her job when the kids were in 2nd or 3rd grade.
As part of our “Back-to-School Family Reset” (see below), I basically declared that I wasn’t doing it anymore and gave them a choice:
1. Eat school lunch
2. Make your own lunch
3. Be hungry
It didn’t happen overnight. It required scaffolding, collaboration, and skill building before we got into a rhythm. But it worked, and it grew into an awesome system we use to this day:
- My youngest makes a batch of protein pancakes or peanut butter sandwiches on Sunday and freezes them in Ziplocs. In the morning, he empties yesterday’s lunch bag and fills it up with all the grab ‘n go items we keep handy: pre-cut veggies in a tupperware, fruit in a basket, string cheese or seaweed snacks. It takes him less than two minutes and means he doesn’t have to stand in the lunch line.
- My middle one eats school lunch and never complains.
- My oldest? Ya know, I’m not entirely sure what he did. He fended for himself and figured it out. He kept growing and never seemed to be hangry…so that’s a win!
If last year’s lunch routine was a hassle, consider doing something different this year. The goal isn’t to copy my system. It’s to come up with your own system that you like better than last year.
2. How to Do a Back-To-School Family Reset
My family would not survive our transition back to school without our annual “Back to School Family Reset” and whiteboard exercise.
My kids groan about it, but they’d be lost without it – so we march on!
If you know me, you know I rely on a huge whiteboard to help us plan for screen rules, new morning and evening routines (and we get granular!), carpool schedule, our “chore draft,” and a calendar for the first month of school.
I can’t teach you the whole process via email, which is why I’m doing a workshop on this topic TWICE in August.
Join me live if you want to see my family’s process in action, hear examples, and get tips on how to make a back-to-school family reset work for you.
Registration is required.
“How to Do a Back-to-School Family Reset”
with Rachel Sklar
August 6th @ 12pm Pacific
or
August 13th @ 12pm Pacific
Rachel
P.S. I’m literally sending this just before midnight on Tuesday. Apparently this is when life is quiet enough for me to think.