…making morning time easy…

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that this particular crafter in possession of a warm bed, must be in want of a snooze button…

I am not the world’s most pleasant morning person. The alarm goes off, and my brain slowly kicks into gear, and I lie there mentally moaning for a good twenty minutes, trying to psych myself up to get out of bed. Once I’m up, I’m fine, it’s just the getting up that I have trouble with. For a long time, I’ve had grand plans to work on my morning routine. Get up, get going, get my bible journaling done before the kids woke up. In reality, I was lucky to get coffee & shower before it was time to hit the ground running, and chase my tail all day long until I hustled out the door at 9 to get them to school.

For the last two weeks, that has started to change. For one, I don’t have the school morning hustle, now that we homeschool (more on that in a later post). Another change has been deleting the facebook app off my phone, so I can’t lie in bed and mindlessly scroll through my feed. And the third big change, and the one that I think has made the biggest difference, is my new morning basket.

 

{Tuesday Tip} one of the most common blocks I hear from folks is “I love the idea but I don’t think I have time to get the value out of them”. Want to know a little secret? It doesn’t have to take much time at all. This is my morning basket, and I set it up each evening. Inside, it has my next morning’s LLV in a zippy pouch. A roller or two from the touch kits (generally emotions ones, that I keep the same for the whole week), and my water bottle filled and oil added. Takes me 5 minutes before bed, and it’s there ready for me in the morning. And even if all my morning plans go to pot, well, I know I’ll at least get my LLV, water &I some oils on me, with zero effort required during the busy morning rush. This week’s addition to the routine is to get the diffuser ready the night before too!!

A post shared by @essentiallybarefoot on Oct 2, 2017 at 7:30pm PDT

I used a modified version of the One Hour Basket**, with the last of my Queen Bee linen for the outer, and denim for the lining. I am a sucker for the linen/denim combo! I tweaked the pattern by shortening it from 16″ to 12″, for two reasons. One, I wanted something not much larger than my journaling bible, and two, I was determined to use that linen and that’s as large as my remnant would allow!! Priorities, I have them! The other mod I made was to add pockets to the inside, to hold stamps and ink and pens and paint scrapers and pretend I was somewhat organised! I also pop a little zippy pouch in there with my vitamins so I don’t forget to take them. One pocket is a flat 8″x 4″ pocket, the other started out the same size but I added a 1/2″ box to the corners to give it a bit of breathing space for bulkier supplies like ink pads etc.

With the basket packed the night before and ready to go, it makes my mornings feel more organised, and it is super quick to grab it off the bag cupboard, read my devotions over brekkie and then journal as I finish up my coffee. I would also like to add in one of my mini CarDori’s, to start doing some morning page journaling as well. But baby steps. One does not become a morning person overnight!

To keep things simple, I load it up on Sunday nights, with the supplies I will use for the week. It means I am using the same colours and pens all week, but it also means I’m not wasting time muvking about picking paint colours and stencils and and and… next minute I’ve wasted a good half hour that I could have used creatively, and instead I’ve stared into my cupboard and made a mess, and not the good kind of mess! Now, it’s there. That’s what I use.

Currently in my kit – 3 acrylic paints, an old licence for scraping, a 2×3″ stamp set that has great versatile patterns, a black memento ink pad, my favourite blackwing lead pencil, an 03 & 08 Micron pen, my journaling bible & my vitamins. Keeping it simple to be kind to my half-asleep brain. And simple also means less chance to make excuses. No ifs, no buts. Get up, get going. And if I’m being honest with myself, maybe I might be able to become convinced that being a morning person is actually a pretty good thing. Maybe.

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