It’s back to school season: Make a change

There’s a whole lot of change coming to households across the region as school resumes this month.

What would you like to be different this year? Experiment with tiny changes. What one small thing would make life better?

Many years ago, my mother simplified our mornings by moving the making of lunch sandwiches to Sunday night. She bought the sandwich meat, fruit, snacks, etc., and told us that we three kids would rotate making everyone sandwiches. From then on, one of us made 25 sandwiches at a time and froze them. We found ways to entertain ourselves and turned it into quite a production line. In the morning, all we had to do was fill our lunch bags with sandwiches and sides and off we went. No more competing for space to make sandwiches at the same time as we were making breakfast.

My friend Amy George at the Hot Dinner Happy Home blog gets more creative when she packs a week’s worth of lunches for her two daughters, who are younger than we were when we took on making sandwiches.

Whatever approach you take, set yourself up for success. Start small.

We don’t expect kindergartners to do senior-level work. That would be ridiculous. They don’t have the knowledge or experience. No, we start them out slowly, with the basics, and lay the foundation over a dozen years. As young students develop, we layer on knowledge and skills, adding to and fleshing out what they learned earlier. We pick up the pace as we go.

Yet somehow, we expect ourselves – and often others – to make wholesale changes overnight.