Often times, by the end of a hard day at work, I’m running on fumes. I want my back deck and a good book, and 20 or 30 minutes of quiet to decompress. I need that time to get ready for part three of my day: dinner, school work, household clean up, and the dreaded kid bedtime. What I don’t want or need during part three of my day is a litany of weekly activities and commitments holding me hostage every night of the week. 
My daughter has just turned five, and the household rule we have adhered to with ease and little exception is the “one activity at a time” rule. I know this rule won’t always be possible. Eventually, we are going to enter elementary school and be barraged with the opportunity to do more and commit ourselves further, but until that has to happen, being an “unscheduled family” has worked wonderfully. Along with only committing to one activity at a time, we don’t commit to weekend activities that run the length of the school year. We have done a couple of sessions of pre-k soccer on Saturday mornings for six weeks, in conjunction with our one weekday activity (which for the last two years has been dance class), but other than short spurts of swim lessons in the summer, we give one weeknight to an activity and don’t give up our weekends.
We are out of the house by 7:15 each morning and gone all day at work and preschool. The last thing we need at this junction of our lives is more commitment and being stretched even thinner. We are also lucky that we live in a city surrounded by amazing weekend fun opportunities, and also that all of our family and friends are in close proximity. They love an impromptu weekend get together or adventure to explore around town, and those adventures and fun plans are what our weekends are reserved for right now. They have always been, and hopefully will always be, more important to us than cramming in another class or lesson or competition at such a young age.
Our daughter is also your typical only child. She is fiercely independent and will be the first one to tell you that sometimes after a long day at preschool she needs her “business time,” which means she goes and hides in her room or playroom away from other humans for at least thirty minutes when she’s feeling overwhelmed or needs her downtime. Sound familiar? The apple definitely didn’t fall from the tree in the “I love other people and being social, but dang, I need some quiet time too!” category.
While I know that my husband and I, as the parents, won’t always control the narrative when it comes to scheduled weeknight and weekend activities, for now we do. I’m content with the decision we made long ago to limit them, for our sanity and our child’s. Neither she nor we are missing out on anything by not entering weekend-long out-of-town gymnastics meets or trying out for the dance school competition team or playing a sport obsessively at five years old.
There is plenty of time for both the adults and the child in our family to dive into those time-crunching, expensive and demanding schedules– but for now, at our house, we are unscheduled and loving it!
