I’ve been thinking for a couple weeks about putting up a daily routine for Pumpkin 1. It’s been hard getting her ready for bed at night. We have a routine, but sometimes Daddy gives her a bath and sometimes Mommy, and since she’s at the “I only want Mommy” stage, she’ll throw a fit when Daddy goes to bath her. After she’s in bed she also wants a billion things, “need hat!” “need glasses!” “need water!” “no yike shadow” and last night, “no yike birds singing” lol. Also in the morning it’s a bit of a rush. Daycare kids are here before she gets up so she needs to get up and pottied and dressed quickly. I hate rushing her, I love the mornings with her, but the other kids need me too. So my hope was a visual routine would help her stay on track, be fun and be something she could follow as she gets more independent as well as give her a sense of security whether it’s Mommy or Daddy getting her ready for bed.
So first off I needed to find some routine cards. I can’t find the set I actually used to post but these are the same, only in black and white.
Next I printed off the ones I needed and laminated them. I was going to mount them to card stock first but I forgot, so I might redo them down the road.
Then I attached adhesive magnets to the back. Then came the hard part, what to put on the wall for them to stick to? I was going to use a cookie sheet from the dollar store but it wasn’t long enough and looked silly. I thought and thought about what I might have that was magnetic, and then it came to me – can you see in the picture what I used?
Metal rulers! My mother always had a metal ruler. So I asked hubby to pick some up at Staples (as he had to pick up some calender pictures I had laminated). They’re the 12″ ones and were like $2.50 each approx. They also have 16″ ones. I used the Command removable hanging strips to attach the rulers to the wall, and voila! A magnetic daily routine chart.
Pumpkin 1 was very intrigued by it. The top two rows are the morning routine and the bottom two are the evening. I wanted it to go from left to right then down as a form of pre-literacy training. I posted it in the hallway between her room and the bathroom so it’s easy for her to refer to for bathroom things and bedroom things. Now I’m just wondering if I can paint the rulers so they look a little less like, well, rulers!
Anyway, she went to bed very easily and didn’t ask for anything! However, I’m not holding my breath. It might just have been a fluke. Pumpkin 2 helped me install our routine by bending a card and eating a wrapper from the Command strips. He was very intrigued as well.
By the way, the previous owners did the terrible paint job. Makes me cringe.
Pumpkins and Me 