Laundry & Responsibility

I found a way to print out weekly checklists for the kids' chores at Handipoints, so I thought I'd share.

It's a pretty cool web site if you need such a thing, and it's free (though there are ways to spend money there if you really want to).

Even Paloma has a chart, though hers has more behavior-oriented things (use the potty, say please and thank you, etc.) than the other kids' lists.

Recently, we encountered a Gabriel I did not recognize. He decided he did not want to help sort the laundry. (That has been a kid job since they were very small and new colors.) He refused to help and let Carmen do the whole job herself (and in the winter, our family laundry pile is pretty big). The consequence for this was he didn't get to watch the Pixar movie shorts with David & the girls that night (which we had checked out from the library). We gave him several chances to keep this from happening, knowing he'd be upset later, but he was as stubborn as I've ever seen him. I would have added on the consequence of not going to a party that weekend also, but I had already RSVP'd. I warned him that the next time, this might happen.

The next week, he had to do the job by himself. It was not fun making him do it, but we did, and he did it, though it was past his bedtime. In the meantime, I found this web site and made the charts and started talking to all of the kids about how being a part of this family means helping each other, and how this allows us to have time to do fun things together.

Another cool thing about the web site is you can choose goals like material rewards, trips or other rewards like play dates or getting to decide things. I made a long list of choices of things they could choose including vacation destinations.

Anyway this seemed to work and we have our son Gabriel back. This past weekend I told the kids I would time them to see how long it took. Without trying that hard, they sorted the laundry in 12 minutes! Now they're motivated to beat that time.

I'm not sure how much the charts are helping, but one of Gabe's tasks is to try new foods. He has tried a few things, but he wanted a check mark to try a new syrup on his pancake last weekend. Crazy kid!

Carmen is starting to ask questions about allowance and we need to get that going. I have the book Money Doesn't Grow on Trees, but I've never implemented what I know from it. Any advice? I need to keep it simple!

She's also asking for a DS and a cell phone--yikes! Although I'm not crazy about the idea of her having a DS, I guess I will consider it if she works for it. A cell phone? No way! She can hardly keep up with her own nose. I don't know what the right age for that is, but it's definitely not 7 1/2! After what I've seen with my high-school aged students (a post I wrote in January but only recently published), maybe the answer is college-age!

I'm warming up to the idea of getting a Wii maybe next year at Christmas so we can do that as a family, but part of me wants to downplay the screen time as much as possible. I want them to do all of the sports they can, read, play, make art & music. I don't know how many more distractions I want them to have from those things! It's already so easy for them to spend too much time playing games on the internet.