The Most Productive 7 Minutes
It’s hard to squeeze in the things you need to do with 3 kids and a dog all running around wild. Add to that a routine where you need to brush their teeth and floss to make each day extra challenging. Teeth are one of the most important parts of your body to take care of and getting my 5 year old daughter and 3 year old son to sit still for 7 minutes is a unique experience every day.
To try and get them to sit still so I can floss and brush each of their teeth, we start the most productive 7 minutes of our day with finding a short Cocomelon video to watch. While I brush and floss one set of teeth, the other is laying there as well and hopefully absorbing some type of lesson from Cocomelon (or at least enjoying the music and colorful pictures). It takes me 3.5 minutes for each kid and when I get to the brushing part, I try to squeeze in a short core workout. The tooth brushing part is 2 minutes and the toothbrush buzzes every 30 seconds so I know how long I have held my plank. I try to at least do the plank for a minute during each brushing cycle and on some nights, I replace individual 1 minute planks with a straight 2 minute plank on the last brush cycle. On those nights, I’m really hoping for a catchy Cocomelon video to take my mind off of the plank!
I find that being a grown-up and parent requires stacking a few things that make sense together in one time period to maximize the time. I’m cleaning their teeth and getting a small workout done while the kids are enjoying a little screen time. If I do the 2 minutes of planking every day, I would have squeezed in 730 minutes worth of a core workout a year. That’s 12.17 hours of planking each year and my core is sore just thinking about it, but I know those things pay off in the long run. I’m probably not going to get back the solid hours that I had a day to work out for a while and finding ways to squeeze in little workouts here and there is now my new normal. Now, just got to make sure I have the right form each day and those 730 minutes will be extra productive each year!
