Beating Monday morning blues

Do you dread Monday mornings? I do, rather, I used to. Not because it meant starting another work week after a weekend of holidaying. I love my work, and Mondays are always the best day of my week, work-wise, but I’ll save that for another post. I dreaded Monday mornings because it meant another week of early morning scrambles. A kid who has to be readied and sent to school, myself and husband who have to get ready for work, breakfast and lunch to be prepared and packed, instructions to be given to the maid, a house that’s in a complete mess after the weekend (of course, the type of mess depends on whether you have kids or have been partying, or both!)…the list seems endless. Monday mornings just left me wondering where to begin.

Time and trial-and-error have taught me a few lessons on tackling Monday mornings. Here are a few tips that you can use to attack Mondays before they attack you.

Note: The first tip is from an article I read long back in Reader’s Digest. I don’t remember the author, but I would love to thank her. It is one piece of advice that has proved most helpful.

2. Drink your tea in peace – Again something we all ignore to do. We make tea and then forget about it while we rush around fixing breakfast or waking the kid or waking the husband.  And somewhere between all that running around, we remember the ignored cup  of tea, which has now gone cold, and then gulp it down. Don’t do it. Drink your tea when it’s hot. It’ll make you feel a lot fresher and a lot less cranky.

3. Plan your meals in advance – Take out half an hour before going to bed on Sunday night to decide what you will cook for the next 5 days. Write it down if you have trouble remembering. You can even prepare and deep freeze some basic ingredients. Chutneys, idli and dosa batters, boiled and drained macaroni, chole or noodles, all these can be frozen for 3-5 days without coming to any harm. You could take help from your spouse; this work gets done faster when two people do it.

4. Keep your outfit planned – This is something I have learnt from my grandfather. He would lay out every article he would need the next morning neatly on a chair before going to bed. It helps save time when you don’t have to look for those matching pair of earrings or shoes in the morning. It wouldn’t harm to carry out the same exercise for the kids as well.

5. Start early – Early to bed and early to rise is really not as phony and impossible as it sounds. It may not always be possible to sleep early, but getting up on time will always help a lot. Snoozing that alarm for 5 minutes may seem tempting, but 5 minutes in the morning do make a lot of difference.

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Mondays are a start to a fresh new week, and a chance to set right whatever went wrong last week. It is just not right to blemish that with chaos. So next Monday when you start the day, try out some of these tips.

Pic credit: magicmarie (royalty free images)

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