![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.mops.org\/images\/cms_images\/alex-2.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nI have four children, a husband and a puppy in the house. I don\u2019t really understand the concept of alone time in this season of my life. So unless you count two o\u2019clock in the morning, the thought of carving out a bit of quiet just for myself seems pretty impossible. But despite the host of challenges, that\u2019s exactly what I did a year ago: I focused an entire month around adding just a bit of silence to my days.<\/p>\n
Why? Because I was having a difficult time hearing myself think. I\u2019d wake up with the frenzied pace of the night before already greeting me as my alarm sounded. I wasn\u2019t sure if the demands requiring my attention were truly my priorities. I didn\u2019t have enough space to recalibrate. Something had to change.<\/p>\n
I knew I needed a little bit of silence to clear my thoughts and approach my life with some peace. So in that month, I learned a few tricks. They aren\u2019t earth shattering, in fact they\u2019re pretty common sense, but actually putting them into practice made a big difference.<\/p>\n
Okay, so I joked about the 2 a.m. quiet hour, but the truth is 6 a.m. is typically a quiet time of day in my home. If I get up before the rest of my house stirs, I\u2019m able to get the coffee made, take the puppy out to go potty, and have a few minutes of quiet before our kitchen becomes its normal zoo-like environment.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not exactly meditating \u2013 you can\u2019t close your eyes while folding laundry \u2013 but many tasks can be done without much thought. Driving with a napping child in the back, washing the dishes, making the bed, are all tasks I do where I can let my mind wander. The key is turning off the optional noise (the television, radio, music) and absorbing the silence as I work.<\/p>\n
I realized as I was setting up my experiment that much of the \u201cnoise\u201d in my life had to do with what I consumed on my screens. So I took a break from social media specifically. And it was embarrassing how much time it opened up in my days for some quiet thinking, even praying. A fast can be an afternoon, a day, a week, a month, a year, any amount of time that allows me to recalibrate away from the virtual noise.<\/p>\n
As with all mothering approaches, I know that as soon as I figure out a pattern that works, my children change and so I must adjust. A baby\u2019s nap schedule, the earlier sunrise, the school breaks all change who is home and what kind of noise they make. It\u2019s figuring out what works in the small tweaks that makes a little quiet not only possible, but sustainable.<\/p>\n
Carving out the quiet is worth it. Because I need to hear myself think.<\/p>\n
How do you carve out a teeny bit of quiet for yourself?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Alexandra Kuykendall<\/strong><\/p>\n As a mom to four girls, Alexandra Kuykendall\u2019s days are spent washing dishes, driving to and from different schools and trying to find a better solution to the laundry dilemma. She is the author of Loving My Actual Life, An Experiment In Relishing What\u2019s Right In Front of Me<\/em> and The Artist\u2019s Daughter, A Memoir<\/em>. A city girl at heart, she makes her home in the shadow of downtown Denver. You can read more of Alex\u2019s everyday thoughts and connect with her at AlexandraKuykendall.com<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have four children, a husband and a puppy in the house. I don\u2019t really understand the concept of alone time in this season of my life. So unless you count two o\u2019clock in the morning, the thought of carving out a bit of quiet just for myself seems pretty impossible. But despite the host […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":2748,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"0","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_seopress_news_disabled":"","_seopress_video_disabled":"","_seopress_video":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas_manual":[],"_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable_all":"","_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas":[],"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[117],"tags":[104,347,360,361,362,363,112],"class_list":["post-2747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wellness","tag-advice","tag-embrace-rest","tag-life-hacks","tag-peace","tag-quiet","tag-silence","tag-tips"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}