Learning to juggle is hard. In terms of co-ordination and concentration, I think it's probably one of the hardest things you can attempt. But once you've managed to conquer the process of learning, adding and changing and adapting the practice is as easy as can be. It never gets any harder than the time when you are still struggling to keep them all in the air. The same can be said about parenting.
We found having Little Mango 1 was a change to our lives, but not really that big a change. Just a change of attitudes really, of priorities. Having Little Mango 3, to complete the set, was also not a hard step because we had done it all before twice over and knew what was coming, plus we now had a five-year-old who was willing to help. Having Little Mango 2, the little miss, the sunshine in my mornings, however, was the struggle. It was with Little Miss Mango that we went through the process of learning the art of juggling kids.
Now we're not very organised people, I'll give you that. We don't make massive grand plans, or organise our weekends down to the minute, and we understand the limitations of reality. We struggle to make it out of the door some days with everybody dressed the right way (I'll admit, usually this is only when I'm home, so I don't know what the connection is there). So right away, you'd think that us being able to handle three kids would be incredibly difficult. And, yes it is hard work sometimes, and it is a struggle to maintain sanity and composure at the same time. But somehow it works. This is because we went through the Little Miss Mango test of parenting.
What that meant was trying to figure out how best to give a four-year-old the attention he needs to still feel like a massive part of our lives, to best serve the needs of an at-times-demanding little girl, to best keep our house in some sort of order and our lives in the realm of rational human still. And though we may not have organisation in our general day-to-day, we do have something just as good. An unbreakable routine.
Now when you hear the word routine, you automatically think of something bad. It's because routine is a thing people can get trapped in. But the only reason you get trapped in a routine is because it has worked so well for so long that you can't see a better way of doing things. Obviously the idea that there could be a better way of doing things should always be something that remains in your mind, and that's why the best types of routine are ones that are adaptable.
At it's heart, a routine is the best way to structure the non-structural – life. It can give you purpose and help you achieve the things that need to happen in an organised and practical way. If you know homework and dinner and baths and bed need to happen, and if you appreciate that they need to happen in a fairly formula way if you want to have any quiet time at all in your house, then a well-worked routine is the best way to do it.
What that means is that when you come home from work, you don't sit down. You commit yourself to ploughing on, pushing through the pain barrier and be happy in the knowledge that you will, in the end, get more personal time at the end of the day if you just don't stop now. I think that's something we learnt very seriously with Little Mango 2. It was tiring, sure – it was hard work, but that was the only way we could see it working. I especially found that if I just kept myself moving relentlessly for a couple of hours at the end of the day, we could have what we wanted – being a tidy house and sleeping children. It meant coming home from work and instead of shying away from the incredible noise of a household at 6pm and losing yourself in the television, you took it all head on, dug in and pushed through. Because the problem with sitting and relaxing is that once I was down, I wasn't getting up again. That's the real misconception about energy – we usually think that working hard will make you more tired, but it's simply not true. Moving gives you energy, which helps you keep moving – it's like the bird drinking the water – went the momentum stops, that's when you do.
So I would come home about 5pm, a nice quiet walk home quickly followed by a ludicrously raucous pair of children, messing up with gusty the house that Mrs Mango had probably kept tidy the entire day. Instead of sitting down, I would say hello to the kids and start making dinner. Or, if Mrs Mango was on to that, I would be putting the then two little mangos in the bath and sorting that side of it out. When that was done and they were both in their pyjamas and sitting back at the table, we would have dinner. It was sort of important at the early stages to eat quickly and keep going because, being a fairly lazy person sometimes, it was the only way to keep the energy up I needed. As soon as I was finished, Mrs Mango and I got up without another thought. We would take in turns the tidy up or put-to-bed schedules and keep in mind that we wanted to have them both in bed by 7:30pm. It was important for us to keep this number in our heads because it was a deadline, both for them and for us. It gave us something to work towards, it gave us a finish line. And if you don't have a finish line, or you can't see it, I can imagine how daunting the task must be, and how much you would struggle to keep going effectively. So, when Little Miss Mango was about one, when we were concentrated in our efforts to get her routine going properly, she would get one story, the music turned on, the light turned off, then bed. There was no other options, there was no “five more minutes”, there was no exceptions – it was just bed. Then Little Mango 1 would at that stage get two, or maybe three stories and then same rules would apply. Little Mango, industrious at wasting time like he is to this day, would fight it for a bit and find reasons to come out, but when you sorted those reasons out before going to bed, he would stop.
Stories are, in my opinion, the best and smartest thing to do at bedtime and it's a no-brainer why when you think about it. Anyone who enjoys reading understands the relaxing nature of it, and the tendency to drift off whilst reading, even as an adult. It's calming. Plus, it's time spent between you and them, one-on-one time, time that you may not be able to get the rest of the day or week, and it gives them a sense of your love, and you the chance to be with them. Thirdly, it has been unequivocally proven that reading to them from an early age helps their language skills and gives them a head start to reading and writing that they would otherwise chase the rest of their lives. It gives them, more than anything else, a love for reading, and if they don't have that, if they grow up thinking it's a chore, than it will be. And if you actually still believe that a child's reading and writing abilities will make little difference to the rest of their lives, then, I'm sorry but you are absolutely kidding yourself. And if you're not in the business of trying to provide your children the best possible future that you can, hopefully better than even the possibilities you were afforded, then perhaps you need to re-think why you became a parent. As I've said before, a box to tick is not a good enough reason to have children. Reading a story to them at night does not take that much time, and is not too much to ask .Do your kids and favour, and do yourself a favour, and read to them; I cannot stress how much it has helped us. It took a bit of patience, a bit of persistence, a bit of dogged dedication, a lot of nights, especially with Little Miss Mango - of going in and out of the room, reassuring her that she is safe and letting her know it was time for bed, giving her a hug and then leaving again, simple words like: 'It's time for bed” repeated over and over again lovingly, but firmly; so that it got to the point where we could count on them being in bed from about 8pm. It was regular as clockwork. Regular as All-bran.
At this stage, the book-reader would come out and find that most things were on their way to getting tidied up for the day, and would probably help or fix up things that needed organising for the next morning. Then, it was time to relax, to do the things that we needed to do for ourselves. Now this may sound selfish, like we were putting this routine in place for the simple fact that we wanted a quiet house and the kids away from us, and sure there was a part of us that did seek the quiet, as every parent does as some stage in the day, and it is a wonderful bi-product of the routine. But it's about more than just that – it's doing what is best for them, giving them boundaries, specifically setting time aside for each of them separately, showing interest in them individually, and giving them something that will help them the rest of their lives – a love of language. So, we benefited from it as well – it's not so much to imagine that a good routine is good for the whole family; life doesn't need to be hell to be a parent. We would get this time to ourselves until bed. And then a whole new set of rules applied.
Mrs Mango and I come up with a series of working arrangements for various times in their lives, depending on their sleeping habits. For a while with Little Miss Mango we came up with a solution that worked quite well. Because I was working close to home, I could leave relatively late in the morning and still be on time -which meant I could sleep in, to a certain respect. So, I chose the night shift and waited with the monitor close at hand for the little miss to wake, because I was usually awake late anyway. Mrs Mango slept and I handled the girl as she learnt to sleep properly. It was a battle, but it meant not getting up early. Only this arrangement came to an end when we began toi have success and Little Miss Mango started sleeping through; as there was no getting up to her at night, I was getting sleep ins for free. So, reluctantly, we changed arrangements. Next was a day-by-day sleep in. One day I would get up with the kids, the next Mrs Mango would. We knew this arrangement could not possibly last forever because we would both have to be going to work one day, but we cherished it while we had the chance And that was an arrangement that worked quite right up until we moved to the Gold Coast. Now, there is no sleep-ins. We are still finding our groove, but I think for a while we are still working on a system where Mrs Mango gets up at night and I get up with them in the morning, offset by me listening out for the little man while I am still awake at night. I think it's working well, but it probably does need a bit of fine adjustment to get it moving like the well-oiled machine of the past.
These are the routines based mainly on the things that are absolutely necessary – getting ready for bed, dealing with sleep, and getting up again. We could make the routine bigger, incorporate more parts of the day, and no doubt as they get older we will have to. But at the moment, it's simple enough that it can be applied in lots of different surroundings and situations and still be as effective. The trick, though, is to not let up, no matter where you are or what you're doing. Keep the routine, above all things.
So having this in place from Little Miss Mango onwards was an amazing thing for us; it meant that when Little Mango 3 came along, if we didn't think about it, we could just fit him into the schedule as it was already going. And we did. The biggest benefit of the third child is that they are three times as independent because they have to fight for that attention, where Little Mango 1 never did. They want to get big, they want to be included; so including them into the routine is actually a lot easier than you might think. It's not such of a battle because we're accustomed to the motions of the routine, and can apply them easier because we now have more experience. We know what to do to get him going to bed on time; how to get him to have a bath; how to get him to eat breakfast. And he is quite willing to do so, because on some level I think he knows that it's best for him to go along with the crowd, and fighting against the unbreakable routine will not work just because of the damn stubborn nature of it. It means he knew bedtime earlier than either of the other kids did, he knows when to get ready for different aspects, he wants to be an active part of it (even as far as toilet training much earlier than the other two). It is unexplainable how the routine is vital to the smooth-running nature of family life. And not smooth-running like nothing ever goes wrong and there is never exceptions to the rules or moments that challenge us. Smooth-running like, when the unexpected events happen and the bad days are upon us, we can fall back upon the routine for support, for a guide as to how to move forward, a path out of the dark.
And that's the key. If you have a strong, unmoveable foundation, you can build whatever you like, you can go anywhere and do anything. People see routine as a trap, but it's not. If it's applied in the right way, with the right frame of mind, it is absolute freedom. Simple as that. Freedom from worry, from stress, from the unknown. No-one in the world who counts themselves a success did so without routine on some level, no matter what they say. And the very successful used it consciously and to their advantage. Learning is the hard part, applying it regularly takes dedication, but once the motion is there, nothing can stop it. If you want to juggle three kids, or five bowling pins, or seven flaming chainsaws, then you have to start with something fundamentally solid, and something very, very simple.
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