Cora's Cottage

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Evenings and nights are my favorite, and I struggle to go to bed at a decent hour if I am left to my own devices and do not work to get to bed earlier. However, over times I have learned that I can train my body to be more tired, or more ready for bed, if I follow the same routine each night.

The trick I have learned, is to have a longer evening and bedtime routine, rather than starting too close to bed time. In a lot of ways my bedtime routine starts as soon as I get home by cleaning up from the day and preparing for the next. When I get home from work, I start by making sure that all my things from the day are taken care of by emptying my bags and putting things away where they belong rather than piling them wherever is most convenient. Then, I empty the dishwasher and fold any laundry from loads that I ran the night before or during the day while I was at work.

Once these initial tasks are complete, I start on whatever projects I have for the night whether that is dinner, or a larger cooking project such canning jam or bone broth. The one thing that stays consistent about this time of the day is that my project wraps, as much as possible, as soon as my husband arrives home from work. This gives me a hard cut off for when my project needs to be completed or almost completed so that I can start the more active part of my evening/night time routine. Before I implemented this habit, I would work on projects until I got tired and then start my bedtime routine . . . which resulted in a lot of 2am nights.

After eating dinner with my husband, we wrap up the dishes and beginning laying the house to rest with a nightly reset, while beginning each of our respective hygiene routines. For me this includes dry brushing, showering, and washing my face with Crunchi’s complete clean beauty skincare lineup, You Deserve It All. I have also gotten into the habit, at least in the winter months, of applying lotion after showering to help keep my skin from drying out.

Once we have both showered we finished doing our nightly reset around the house. Part of my nightly reset routine is to set out my cloths for the next day so that I am not rushing around and creating a mess in the morning when trying to decide what to wear. I also like to set out all the dishes and non-perishable items for breakfast the following morning to help minimize the rushing in the morning. It seems that no matter how much time is planned to get ready in the mornings, it is never enough. Additionally, having made the decisions about what will be worn and eaten for breakfast help to minimize the decisions I having to make right away in the morning.

After resetting the house, we settle down on the couch together, without screens, to help us unwind before bed. Some nights this looks like us having deeper conversations and some nights we are both lost in our own activities. My preference, on nights we are lost in our own activities, is to read. However, while I love to read books, I have several bloggers that I love to read but can never seem to find the time during the day. Since my evenings are screen-free, I had to come up with a creative way to still be able to keep up with my favorite blogs. Now, I print out each blog post so that I can read it in the evenings without having to be on my phone. At first, I had mixed feelings about this solution, but I love to make notes and mark things up as I read, so printing out the blogs to read has been one of the best things I have done! Not to mention, I can save the blogs with recipes and topics I want to refer back to filed away, without having to remember which blogger and blog post it might have come from!

While we are sitting on the couch unwinding before bed, I love to drink an herbal tea like chamomile using a tea ball. Sometimes I will even add a dash of honey and vanilla to my tea in the evenings, especially if I am struggling with a sore throat. I have found that it is beneficial to link the reading or talking with a warm drink that is caffeine-free to help trigger my body to prepare for bed.

Another helpful thing that I have implemented in the evenings is using light that is not nearly as harsh. I have switched out several of the bulbs in our home to resemble more of a warm candlelight glow rather than the harsh white light of most lightbulbs. One of these oblong bulbs is in our hanging lamp that is right above the recliner (my favorite place to unwind at night), and another more round bulb is in the lamp that sits on our end table between our chairs. To help keep the more relaxing light as we head to bed, we have some remote control candles in our bedroom that even have a function that allows them to flicker like real candles! We are even blessed with a light strip around the the top of our kitchen cabinets that has a warm tone which is great when I am wrapping up my evening in the kitchen.