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LOVE WELL
The first year both of my boys were in school together, we had to be out the door by 7:30. We were used to early mornings (trading floor life will do that), but not with two kids to feed, dress, and load up. And even though I spent years out the door early, I am not, in fact, a morning person. We did the standard night-before stuff, but I didn’t want a fresh to-do list at 10pm when I’m already dead tired.
We did decently well until the last few minutes. “GO GET YOUR SHOES AND SOCKS,” and everyone thunders back upstairs and comes down with one sock, or the wrong sweatshirt, or a toy. “Where’s that paper we need?” and I’m digging through backpacks and the piles in their room. So I stopped trying to fix the whole morning and just went after that last mile, the few minutes right before the door. Almost everything I did lives in the mudroom (and if you don’t have a mudroom, then whatever area you have RIGHT by the door.)
(Full honesty: we homeschool now, so this isn’t my current circus. But I lived it for years, and these are the things that actually worked, not theory. We do still leave the house often so while it’s not always at 7am that we have these problems, I think it is a universal issue of people with kids under a certain age.)
Start here: keep the socks WITH the shoes
If you do one thing this week, do this. Our socks do not live upstairs at all. The whole lot of them live in a bin right where we keep our everyday shoes, by the back door. No more running upstairs for socks at the last second where inevitably that slime or soccer ball or whatever else your kid is into lulls them into distraction. Socks and shoes, same spot.
You don’t need a mudroom for this. If your shoes live in the front hall closet, grab any bin or basket, dump the socks in, done. Everybody has some kind of bin sitting around, so this one is free. I did it for myself too, I’ve got a bin in “my” locker with my socks so when I have a few minutes for a quick walk around the block I don’t have to waste precious seconds grabbing socks to get out the door. It took about five minutes to set up and we felt it the very next morning.
One more thing that made socks a non-issue, at least for my two boys: we got rid of almost every sock except one color. Black, all the same size and style. Now everything matches everything, so nobody’s hunting for a pair, you just grab. Bonus for mom: it’s a gift to your laundry – no need to match socks. This one only works if your kids wear the same thing, but if they do, it’s magic.
That one tip changed my life and it’s yours, free, whether you ever pay me a dime. Go set it up this weekend and report back.
Below the line is the rest of the story of my back door revamp. If you relate to any of this you may want to keep reading: The kid who goes upstairs after breakfast to get dressed and comes back twenty minutes later still in PJs and holding a Lego creation. The teeth that “definitely” got brushed, except they definitely didn’t. The stack of school papers that the teacher sent home Monday but end up crunched in to a ball at the bottom of the backpack Friday, with a permission slip buried somewhere in it.
At the end, you’ll get The Setup: the order to build it in and a map of what lives where. It’s the part I’d hand you if you wanted to knock the whole thing out in one weekend instead of reading about it.
If you’re not in a place to pay for this, that’s completely fine. Stay free, the socks fix is yours, and there’s a free issue every week regardless. But if you need help taming the chaos, the paid path will get you more insight into the systems I really use every day.