IT’S a time of chaos. Everything’s topsy turvy. But I’m not talking about politics. I’m talking about family life.

This time of year all sorts of things are either brand spanking new or being rebooted.

For some families children have started pre-school or school for the first time. For others, their teenagers have started college after years of school. Many kids have changed schools and are finding their feet in new environments.

Even for families like mine that haven’t embarked on those transitions this year, we’re struggling to get our children and, indeed, the whole household back into some kind of a weekly routine.

In our case, this involves scheduling an ambitious array of early morning and after-school sporting activities. Our challenge is to minimise time in traffic and ensure there’s time to do homework, have dinner and get the kids to bed early enough to be ready for an early start the next day.

A lot of effort has gone into marking all this out on a colour-coded spreadsheet that’s our weekly military battle plan.

But everything’s still in a shambles.

The kids are ratty because their sleep patterns got totally out of whack over the long holidays. It might be the second week of school but they’re still going to bed much too late and sleeping in the mornings.

Despite our best efforts at organising them each morning, they’re also still struggling to get into their school uniforms, find their new shoes (which are causing a few blisters), pack their backpacks and get to school on time.

School lunches are being completely reformatted after all last year’s healthy choices have been rejected in favour of “something new”.

At the same time both my husband and I are busy at work and our precarious work-life balance is looking distinctly wobbly. We’re all tired, sleeping badly and prone to grumbling.

I know that this chaos won’t last. Soon enough, hopefully really soon, we will all have re-established our weekly routine.

Drop offs and pick ups will be sorted. We’ll have schedules that actually work, in reality, not just on paper.

The children will get their homework done and head off to bed at a reasonably early hour.

Parents may even enjoy some brief moments of peace and tranquillity and time to get ready for the next day’s early start.

It’s an iron law of family life: without routine, there is chaos, and where there is chaos, there is no rest.

We will get there, hopefully …