I love watching the wheels spin when people ask me “you’re on a boat with your kids?” All of a sudden their brain is bombarded with a ton of logistical questions, neurons are firing, and things just aren’t lining up. Well let me tell you the secret of it. Living on a boat with kids, well its just as crazy as living on land with kids, just with a touch more of close contact.
   Kids are crazy little beings in themselves, on land or on a boat. So I do like any mama does, I try my best to have some sort of structure. This is for the girls’ benefit, and for my sanity. On a day to day basis our days look pretty similar, minus those days when we are sailing or discovering a new island. What I am talking about here are the days, once we have settled in to an anchorage and we start to take back some of our daily routine, where things start to feel normal again. On those days, this is what a day on our “kid” boat looks like.
6:30 am Ellia wakes up, then she wakes Arias up, then both of them come and wake Eben up and bug him for breakfast until he is annoyed enough to get out of bed.
7-8:30am Eben gets the girls’ their first, second, and often third breakfast, as they enjoy some early morning shows on our laptop.
8:30am I wake up, get breakfast, sit with the iphone and my breakfast and see what the “World of Facebook” has been up to since I went to bed.
9:00am Eben chooses a boat project for the day, puts his swim shorts on and starts working
9:30am I convince the girls to turn off their shows and do some “school work”
10:00am Ellia is done her school work, I color with her, as I multi task doing another half hour of schooling with Arias
10:30am The girls and I play. Usually they opt for play dough, or dolls. Or “doing a project” as Arias says, which means crafts.
11:45am Total freak out because I have announced 15 minutes until nap time. It is inevitable, I have to fight them on it every single day
12:00 Naptime!!! Otherwise known as Mama and Papa’s quiet time. We will either watch a show on the laptop or I will do some interneting while Eben keeps tinkering on his projects
1:30pm Lunch time 
2:30pm Either play time with friends if we have our buddy boats around, or play time on the beach or in the water. This time of day is crucial as the rest of our day is dependent on it. This is when the girls dispense of all their energy which will guarantee us a good, normal, early night. If the girls miss out on this part of the day we, as parents, pay for it later.
5:30pm Back to the boat for shower time, supper prep time, and kids’ play time. Luckily our girls are really good at cleaning up after themselves and I don’t have to worry too much about the late evening mess they will create because they will also be the ones putting it away.
6:30pm Supper time. This usually lasts about an hour simply because Arias won’t shut up and just blabbers through the entire meal, which means it takes her forever to eat. And Ellia will eat half her meal and then insist that she doesn’t know how to feed herself the second half and needs adult help.
7:30pm PJ’s brushing teeth, pee-pee time. Then the girls get a night time story from Mama and songs on the Ukulele from Papa. Lots of hugs and kisses, sips of water, and goodnights. And then probably at least one more request for more water, more hugs, or just something else really important that they needed to tell us before falling asleep.
7:45pm We insist that the girls need to fall asleep
8:00pm Quiet time. Eben sits on the back of the boat playing games on the iPad, while I sit here writing this, for you.
9:00pm Showtime. Nope, not what you were thinking. We snuggle up in our bed, laptop sitting on the bunkbed that now serves as a “tv mount” and we watch shows until midnight-ish.
Next day, happily repeat.

Of course not every day is like this. But in general, if you are wondering what we are up to at a certain hour of the day, 80% of the time this will lead you to the right answer.

sometimes boo-boos happen!