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Resources from this episode:

The Work & Play Weekly Checklist (Free Download!)
The Work & Play Patreon
Barefoot Dreams Robe
One Thousand Gifts, by Ann Voskamp

Show Notes:

This episode is simply a day in the life of Nancy Ray. This feels a little bit mundane, maybe a little vulnerable to share a day of my life with you, a bit of a peak into our crazy world with raising four kids and work and all of that. But so many people have requested it. So here I am, listen at your own risk or enjoyment.

But I'm grateful that so many of you are interested in the simplicity of my life, and that's what I'm gonna share with you today.

For the full episode, hit play above or read through below.

One quick resource I wanted to share before I share my whole “day in the life” is my weekly checklist that I go through to plan my week. It is a lifesaver. Planning your week ahead of time is a small but very impactful rhythm that I have and I really enjoy.

So if you wanna see kind of what I do to plan out my week, you can head here to get your free download and you can start implementing it in your life, too.

Welcome to a Normal Day in My Life!

Okay, I'm gonna preface this by saying every day of the week for me looks different, so it's kind of hard for me to choose a normal day because they're all very different and I have different themes or buckets for my days of things that we focus on. So I can kind of walk you through a typical week, but I've chosen to share a normal-ish Monday based on my Monday of this week.

So, a week for us, let me just back up. Sunday is church, worship and kind of our prep day for the week. Will and I actually do a lot of work things around the house that afternoon because it's just a lot to prepare for the week.

We fold laundry, we make lunches, we'll try to get outside as a family if we can go on a walk, but we don't really do movie nights or anything on Sunday night. It's just like a prep day.

Okay, Monday and Wednesday are the days that my girls are in school. They're currently in second grade and kindergarten, and they attend a university model school, which I'm gonna talk a lot more about in next week's episode if you're interested.

And then I homeschool them Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. So Monday, Wednesday they're in school. On Mondays, my boys are home with me. They're currently ages four and one.

And then Wednesday, my four year old is in preschool, and the baby goes to Grammy's on Wednesday. So Wednesday is my day. This is, I'm jumping all around. This is getting kind of confusing, but I hope you're hanging with me. Wednesday is my day that I get things done because my sweet mother-in-law takes care of the kids, takes them back and forth to school and preschool and watches the baby for me.

So Thursday is a homeschool day.

Friday is just our, “Hey, I'm home with all the kids.” It's like a free day. We finish up any homeschool we didn't finish up, we meet with friends for play dates. I keep Friday as open for adventures or just to be home, which is nice. And Saturday is our Sabbath where we really try to intentionally kind of rest as a family, and we are gonna be working on that even more this year, which I'm excited about.

So let's go back to Monday.

Monday

This is kind of what it looks like on a Monday when my girls go to school and both boys are home with me. So it starts at 5:30 in the morning, that's when my alarm goes off, and I'll get up and I put on my most comfortable robe, which I am obsessed with. I learned about it from a podcast, but it's the Barefoot Dreams robe. I'm gonna have to link for it in the show notes because honestly, it is what gets me out of bed in the morning. It is so comfy. I put on my robe, I put on my bedroom slippers, go to the bathroom, go get my coffee, and we always make our coffee the night before, which is just the best life hack in my opinion, because every morning at 5:30, I know that all I have to do is get up and put on my robe and go get my coffee, and it's like waiting for me. I don't have to wait to make it. And I sit on the couch and I try to have about 15 to 30 minutes of quiet time.

I pray, I read scripture. I just talk to God about the things heavy on my heart. I praise him. I talk about the day. I just try to spend some time and worship. And that has been very life giving for me recently to just make sure that I'm up that early. So I can do that. About six o'clock I will go put on my workout clothes and I'll head up to the playroom and I will turn on my workout for that day.

And I've just recently, I mean back in December, I don't know, a month ago, just recently joined Beachbody online because my gym membership just was not working for me anymore. We had so much sickness in our house last year. I was never able to go to the gym or take my kids to the gym, and I think they were getting sick a lot from the gym. And I just decided that I'm not working out because I can't get to the gym and this isn't working. So a friend of mine recommended Beachbody and that's what I've been doing. So I'll turn on my Beachbody workout at about 6 or 6:10 and I'll work out and usually Beaufort my four year old comes into the room and watches me do my workout.

At about 6:45, I'll finish up and that's when I go to the girls' room to make sure that they're awake. So I wake the girls up and then head back to the baby's room and I'll nurse the baby, wake him up, change his diaper, and then we'll all make our way downstairs for breakfast. And hopefully by now the girls are dressed.

They know on school days they have to be dressed before they leave their room and come downstairs. And so then we'll eat breakfast and I will maybe hop in the shower if I'm lucky and change my clothes. But usually I just stay in my sweaty workout clothes and get everybody off to school. And the boys just usually ride in their jammies. I don't make them put clothes on on a Monday unless I know we're going to a park or something like that.

So here we are off to school. I'm in my sweaty workout outfit. The boys are in their jammies. The girls are dressed and ready, and we leave the house around 7:30 in the morning. After we drop off the girls and do the carpool thing, we head either back home to do some stuff, maybe we'll meet a friend, maybe we'll go on a walk if the weather is pretty. But most of the time we head to either Sam's Club to walk around and do my once a month shopping there, or we'll go to an Aldi or Target pickup to pick up groceries after we drop the girls off. So it kind of depends on what we've got planned and if I got the grocery order done the night before or not, but typically it's the girls off and then I take the boys to do a grocery order or a pickup and then we'll head home.

And when we get home, 10 o'clock is usually when we do a snack time. I'll let the boys just kind of play around for a little while, while I unload the groceries and clean up the kitchen, because I leave my kitchen in a total disaster every morning, and it just takes time to reset the house. I'll usually throw in a load of laundry and all the while the boys are playing and about 10 o'clock we'll stop for snacks and then I'll let the boys keep playing if it's nice outside and I can let them go outside, that's ideal.

But I'm recording this episode in the middle of winter. So recently it's just been a lot of playroom time or just kind of wandering around downstairs, finding things to do while mama does some household cleaning and all the things it takes to run a home. After snack, if Benji's real hungry, I'll give him like a lunch around 11:30 and then I'll put him down for a nap. But if he's real tired, I'll just put him down for a nap right after snack. Beaufort hangs out with me, and he is my four year old that loves a play buddy. And so he wants me to play with him constantly. So, I might play with him a little bit, but then I say Mondays are his days to just kind of be home with mama.

He loves it and he gets to watch, he gets to watch Paw Patrol when Benji goes down for a nap, but I don't let him watch any until Benji's down. So it's usually around lunchtime that he'll watch a little bit for the first time and I'll let him watch a few shows while I get some work done. And usually that looks like me planning for this podcast, planning out my content, my next episodes, and I'll get in my email inbox and we'll try to clean that up and answer any email messages waiting for me. And I'll just kind of tidy up the work element of things after the weekend.

And then I'll make lunch for me and Beaufort and we'll turn off the TV and we'll eat lunch together. Then I'll try to clean up lunch, maybe unload the dishwasher and do more tidying around the house, switch over the laundry. And usually I try to tackle some sort of house project, whether it's cleaning out the fridge and freezer or the pantry or you know, just there's always a section of the house or room or small cabinet area or drawer or something that needs my attention.

So I'll try to do that, knock something out just to tidy up a little bit more. And then Benji typically wakes up between 1-2, and so once he wakes up, the boys will continue to play for a little bit and then I'll feed him lunch if he did not eat before his nap. And then during that time, I'll kind of start prepping for dinner. I'll kind of lay out my dinner plans. I'll print and look over the lesson plans that I have for the girls the next day. And by 2:45, I leave the house to go pick up the girls from school. So load up the boys. We head back out to school. It's about a 20-25 minute drive for us. So it's a little bit of a drive, waiting carpool line, come back home and when we get home, the house is full again.

The girls come in with their backpacks and their jackets and all the things, and they have their little system. I tell them to put their backpacks in the homeschool room, lunch boxes on the table next to the sink, water bottles on the dinner table. I'll start prepping dinner and they'll start doing chores.

Of course, they don't just magically start doing chores, I have to tell them a million times to help me and do the chores and bring their backpacks and put them in the right spot and set the table. Sometimes I'll just say, “Hey, everybody, go get in the bathtub.” I'll just say, put everything down. I wanna make dinner in peace, and I want you guys to go get in the bathtub.

Obviously Benji's not old enough to do that, so he'll kind of like toddle around the kitchen while I'm making dinner and ask me to hold him a million times while I'm trying to make dinner. But yeah, I usually make dinner from like 4:15-5:15. And that's not just dinner, but it's also just re-setting after the kids are home and things like that. So I'm interrupted a million times and yeah, it's great.

Sometimes they'll help me make dinner, sometimes they'll just go play. It's just kind of like free time. But we've, we've kind of enforced this thing now where they don't get any TV on school nights. And so Monday through Friday, we don't watch any TV in our house. And that's actually been a really big blessing. At first, I was kind of scared to do it because it was a big motivator. Like you can watch TV once your chores are done and you can watch TV once everything's way, but it just ended up being, I don't know, their emotions, I felt like were out of control every time we turn the TV off.

So once I've just kind of taken that off the table, they've been a little bit more involved in making dinner and also more playful, just kind of going off and playing by themselves, which is what I prefer anyway, even though I do get interrupted a little bit more, it's made for just a more peaceful home.

So they kind of do their own thing or maybe take a bath or play while I'm getting dinner on the table. And then at about 5:30 we eat dinner, and that is when Will usually gets home. He usually gets home somewhere between 5-5:30 as I'm getting dinner onto the table. And so I aim for like 5:15-5:30. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. It just depends on what I'm making. But he'll get home, he likes to change into comfy clothes right away.

So, he'll take the baby into the closet and while he's changing, Benji can kind of just be out from underneath my feet. He can be with Will for a few minutes while the other big kids are playing. And then we'll all sit down and eat dinner together. And we usually pray, sometimes we'll sing a song after we pray, usually the doxology, and then we'll eat. And you know, I just don't want you to get an idea that dinner is like a perfect situation in our house. It's far from that. It's a lot of loud behavior and kids getting down and up from their chairs a lot and us telling them to sit back down a lot. And there's someone probably cries like at least once, and usually Beaufort if he doesn't like the food, he just is like, “Can I go now?” Like he just wants to go like he has skipped dinner so many times if he doesn't like the food that I prep for him. And I'm just like, okay, buddy, you have a full plate of food here that you can eat if you want.

So let me just preface this little dinner segment by saying it's loud, it's crazy, it's fun. It's what a family with four small kids looks like a dinnertime. It's, it's crazy. It's very messy. The floor is in a very messy way after we are all done. But it's also a joy and we are committed to trying to keep this as a rhythm for our family where we eat together every night where we're all around the same table. And so we'll pull up the high chair to the table, and after we pray and sing a song, maybe we'll just share about our day. And so we ask, we'll kind of rotate between, okay, everybody has to ask an interesting question or we'll play High Low Buffalo, or we have this little like stack of cards for like family questions.

So we might get that out and ask a question, or we might just talk about each other's days and just like chat and say, how was your day? And go around the table and talk about our days. And so, you know, mix that in with all of the craziness of four little kids. And that's what it kind of looks like.

And after dinners, then we do really try to get the kids to help us clear the table every night, take all their plates over to the sink. And once they do that, usually Will and I kind of divide and conquer. So one of us will stay and clean up the kitchen while the other one takes the boys up to do bath time, or we'll put on some fun music and the whole family will just kind of be in the kitchen while we clean up everything together. And then we'll all go up together for bedtime routine.

Bedtime routine is just bath time, jammies, brush teeth, brush hair, read a book together. Right now we're reading through The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in the Chronicles of Narnia. And so typically after we do baths and jams and all that, I will put Benji down while Will finishes up with the other three big kids, and then I'll join them and we'll read a chapter in a book together. And then they'll all go to their own beds and we'll pray and we'll sing and we'll put them to to bed. And that's usually sometime between 7:30-8 for the big kids. And Benji, he'll go down between 7-7:30. Then Will and I come downstairs and we finish cleaning up the kitchen because inevitably we did not finish it. I mean, there's just no way to totally finish cleaning the kitchen, but we will finish cleaning it.

Typically after the, the kids are in bed, the kids might wander out a little bit, ask us questions, say they need us, say they need water, you know, all the while we're making coffee for the next day, setting it for 5:00 AM. We're just tidying up because there's toys everywhere. There's a messy kitchen. We're just tidying up kind of the downstairs of our house typically. And we usually do that until about 8:30-8:45, which is when we kind of start our wind down routine.

And we usually like, I don't know, we kind of choose from a few different things that we could do. One is just watch TV while we fold. We have our favorite TV shows that we watch currently we're watching: Alone, which is just fascinating. It's a great show about these people who go live alone in the wilderness. And we like something kinda like that while we're folding.

And we'll fold laundry together because listen, it's just, it's so hard for me to fold laundry during the day when I have homeschool on my plate during the week. So we'll do that maybe two nights a week, or I'll just go draw a bath and I'll take a hot bath. Actually, I do that every night no matter what, but I might just skip watching and folding and I'll just go straight to taking a bath and then usually Will and I just catch up. We talk about our days, share about work, share about kids, share about life. And then we get in bed and read for a while, and we're aiming to be in bed by like 9:30 these days. Call us grandma and grandpa if you must. I don't care. I am all about going to bed early and waking up early these days.

It has been so life-giving to be able to wake up and spend that time with the Lord and work out before anything else. It has just been one of the most life-giving things, and it's a fairly new rhythm that I've incorporated into my life, re-incorporated into my life. And so I'm very grateful for that.

So now we are exhausted by nine o'clock and we are happy to fall in the bed and read for a little while. We've got some good books in stock. It's just a lovely time to just like catch up and read. And then we'll go to bed between 9:30-10.

Okay guys, listen, I just went through my day in detail.

Are you so bored? Was that entertaining? I don't know. So many people wanted me to share a day in the life. I have no idea whether that was entertaining or like just so boring. But that's what our Mondays look like. Next week I'm gonna be telling you more about our homeschool days and what homeschool days look like. It might not be what you expect, it's not like the most beautiful, perfect, organized homeschool day, but we make it work for us, and I'm excited to share more about that.

And also just university model schools in general, why we chose that school. I've had so many questions about this and I know it might not resonate with everyone who listens, but so many people voted for this as a podcast episode so I'm just gonna go for it.

So we're gonna cover that next week, and I'll kind of go through more of a day in the life on a homeschool day next week.

Guys, thanks so much for listening to this podcast. It means so much to me. And I did wanna mention, I'm gonna be adding the book One Thousand Gifts to my Cornerstore this week because it is a beautiful book that reminds you to really look for the small but incredible things to be thankful for in your mundane day-to-day life.

And I know it feels a little funny or silly or strange for me to share just a day in the life with you, and you might feel the same way if you shared an entire day with someone else. But the truth is, is there is such beauty to be had in just our day-to-day living. And I was reminded of that by so many of you asking for me to just share a day in my life with you.

And the book a thousand Gifts is just a beautiful reminder if you're looking for, I don't know, a renewal of joy in your mundane ordinary days. It's a great book to grab and you can find that over at nancyray.com/cornerstore, which is my Amazon affiliate store, and you can see all the books I've ever recommended there as well.

I'm gonna close with words from Albert Einstein who said,