1. There may be disadvantages to the world knowing your Slob Secret, but it sure is nice when old friends who read your blog and know your heart come over and you don’t have to worry about having a perfect home.
2. How much would you be willing to pay to have your bathrooms wiped down nightly? My 8yo is currently obsessed with getting this ping-pong set
3. When I was in the Toddler Trenches, I never thought this day would come, but it did. It sure is nice to be able to clean the kitchen while assigning all the other house-cleaning tasks to the kids. Things may not be perfect, but it’s great to see the fruits of my efforts to teach them basic cleaning skills.
4. Oh, and the kid who wants the ping-pong set? He asked if we could be sure that the dining room table always stay completely cleared once he gets it.
Good luck with that . . .
And those are my random thoughts at the end of this day when we went to the pool TWICE.
Twice.
This Mama’s tired.
The Amazon link? Totally my affiliate link.
Having kids help with chores is fine for us during the summer but we are so busy during the school year with homework, dance, basketball, etc. It’s hard to find the time for the kids to do those. How will the new school year affect your chore chart?
I know this question was for Nony, but the system that works for us is to transition at the end of summer to an earlier waking time so we’re ready for the school year and once school starts spend a little time before school doing chores. They have a home chore (ie dusting) to do every day and a personal chore (ie vacuum the bedroom or start their laundry) to do every day before school and are supposed to set a timer for 10 minutes for each of these chores. Then the older ones (mine are 4,7, and 9) have a saturday chore like mopping. Oh, and they each have a bathroom chore every morning. The older one wipes down the toilet, and the 7 year old is in charge of picking up anything on the bathroom floor and wiping down the sink and counter, and the youngest takes out the bathroom trash and makes sure that there’s toilet paper on the roll. The main thing is that I get them up 1/2 hour earlier than they would need without chores and use a timer.
Our school day doesn’t start until 9 (bus at 8:30), so for some people I know evening chores would work better.
It really won’t affect the chore chart much, because that’s all ultra basic habit stuff. Honestly, a lot of it gets done right before bedtime, because that’s when I check off their chart. As far as big cleaning tasks though, I’ll do most of those while the kids are in school. I do enlist them when needed on weekends, but our time is also so busy that if I tried to save that stuff for when they get home from school, we’d probably put it off forever!
I was wondering the same thing as Michelle. This will be my 6 year olds first year of all day school. I am going to miss her so much. Not only do we have a lot of fun together, but she has been so much help this summer! I am trying to figure out how I am going to keep from going backwards on the house next year. She won’t be able to help as much, plus my 3 year old took naps last school year but doesn’t this year. Also, I am going to have a young foster child in the near future. I am going to have to have a whole new plan and I don’t know what it is yet.
It’s sooo hard to re-adjust a working routine when your schedule changes. Give yourself time to figure it out. I always find that there are things that work really well in certain phases of life, and when I move into a new phase, it’s so hard to give up on what was working before and find a new way for things to work.
We have that ping pong set! I can’t remember which “Mart” we found it at, but look the next time you go to one, b/c I DO remember that it was about the same price as this. (unless of course you get free shipping)
I’ll let him know!
lol! my kids are never more motivated to do chores than when they want new legos. (eye roll)
and yes, i pay double for scooping the cat poop.
I took the kids to the neighborhood pool for the first time today. I don’t know how you do it Nony. We lasted about 50mins. My son is threes year old and was all over the place! My daughter is 7, so I’m ok with her hanging out in the shallow end without me. My son on the other hand will grab a pool toy and sprint from the splash area to the big pool the moment he see’s a chance.