Tuesday, January 04, 2011

It's been a long road, Part 2

So we were quickly realizing that some changes needed to be made in the basic structure of our schedules. Simply asking if anyone wanted to help clean was not working. Nor was it going to work. We had led the kids to believe that it was okay not to do much around the house. The time for them to help with the cleaning was before a big party or if their rooms were messy.

In retrospect I can't believe it took me this long to decide that something had to be done. For so long friends would tell me that I needed to get the kids to help more. I would get so stressed out that it seemed that nothing got done. And this was before the accident. Afterwards we managed to limp by until December.The kids ate a lot of highly processed foods and we ate fast food quite a bit, but we were getting by. Then Steve went back to school full time, along with working full time. I needed to let him have all his spare time for studying, not cleaning and cooking. So we sat the kids down and had a heart to heart with them. What came out of this meeting was a thing of pure beauty. A chore system that wouldn't cost us a fortune from an already tight budget in a weekly allowance, but would allow them to earn a little bit of money or some xbox time. There are also other rewards too but those are the ones the kids were excited about. (They are only allowed a half an hour of xbox per day currently.)

How does this chore chart work? Stay tuned as I discuss it more in depth tomorrow.

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