^“5 God is within her, she will not fall;

The first challenge in self-care for moms is simply this: Get up 30 minutes before your kids wake up and have quiet time alone. 

This might be easy for some people who are natural early risers, and more difficult for other people, like me,  who are night-owls and use their kids as alarm clocks. However, there are so many scientific benefits to rising early in the morning, like reducing stress and handling negativity better. Not only that, making intentional quiet time to spend in silence praying, meditating on scripture or listening to worship will help set our minds right for the day and remind us of where our focus should be, on Him, before all of the child screaming starts, of course.

Think about your ideal morning and how you would like to wake up. Pick and choose the things that are possible and able to fit into a little 30 min routine before your kids wake up. We would like to challenge everyone to read the theme verse for this week every morning. And we challenge you to read all of Psalm 46 at least once this week. It is a good reminder to be still and rely on God.

For example, this is my plan for my mornings this week:

• Wake up to an alarm at 5:30 and pull myself out of bed.
• Go downstairs with glasses on, in my jammies and put on a pot of coffee.
• Sit in our sunroom with my coffee and read Psalm 46:5.
• Listen to a Lauren Daigle Pandora station for the rest of my time alone and enjoy the quiet of no toys making noise and no children screaming for juice.
• My goal is to finish one cup of coffee, while it is still hot, before my kids wake up.

This is doable for me for a couple reasons… 1) I know that I cannot function at a high level that early to dive into a Bible study, but having slow time to listen to worship music puts my head in the right space for the rest of the day. 2) I like coffee. I don’t like coffee when it has sat cold and been reheated 4 to 5 times. So enjoying that first cup while it is still hot is one of those little luxuries that makes me feel refreshed and calm.

So, choose something similar for you, something you know is doable and would bring you to a place to be able to worship for the rest of the day and then make the commitment to do it. 

Now, there are a few nuances to this challenge:

1. This is not a time to spend on your phone or on social media. We encourage you to use a physical Bible as opposed to a Bible app to read your Scripture. It is easy to start there but then you get a text that you need to reply to or see a notification and next thing you know you have spent your quiet time in a digital vortex, not feeling any more refreshed.
2. Getting up early implies that you also have to go to bed early. I will admit, this will be hard for me. I am not one that goes to bed before 10 or 11 (or 12) often. But in order to feel rejuvenated and have an active mind to spend in the Word, you can’t sacrifice sleep. This is self-care, and getting good rest is key.
3. Some of you have newborns and are working on 5am feedings, so getting up any earlier than that would actually be a step back from self-care. Totally get that. In that case, we would just encourage you to take you quiet time sometime before 9am. Maybe it is during a feeding, maybe when they have gone back down, maybe when they are happy in their swing.

Good luck this week ladies, we are so very excited to start this journey in taking care of our selves even with all that motherhood throws at us. We hope to encourage you in this and that you do feel refreshed and rejuvenated doing something for yourself and your relationship with the Lord.