I am ashamed to admit that my children don’t do chores. At least not on a regular basis. If I ask them to set the table or pick up crumbs with the handheld vacuum or shuttle something upstairs or down, they comply (with varying degrees of cheerfulness). But they don’t have assigned daily or weekly chores, mostly out of sheer parental laziness (and unwillingness to cede control).
They also don’t get an allowance. They take in so much cash from greeting cards (seriously) that they honestly don’t need much more. If we gave them a few dollars a week they would just spend it on mass quantities of gum and Nintendo points.
But they still like to earn money from time to time (like the times when I refuse to buy them any gum or Nintendo points). And I want them to develop a sense of responsibility for the household, as well as the basic skills they need to take care of themselves and their living space.
After a few random attempts where my husband or I promised totally divergent amounts for similar jobs, we’ve come up with a plan that I think might work. We’re making a list of prerequisite jobs, everyday tasks that don’t come with a paycheck: keeping their bedrooms picked up, putting away their shoes on the shelves expressly installed for that purpose by the back door, clearing their dinner dishes, and so on.
Then we’re making another list of money-earners: folding and putting away laundry, weeding, watering outdoor plants, unloading the dishwasher, etc. These will each have a predetermined fee. The catch is that all prerequisite tasks must be done before the child may take on an extra chore for extra cash.
What do you think? How do you handle chores/allowance/spending money with your kids?
(That’s not a reference to a certain Disneyfied pop star, BTW.)
One of the quirks of our old house is the second-floor layout. At the top of the stairs, there is a wide hallway with five doors visible: two on the left, two on the right, one straight ahead. On the left is the bathroom and one bedroom. On the right is a little storage room (we have no attic) and another bedroom. If you open the straight-ahead door, you enter an odd little anteroom where you’ll find another three doors. To the left, there is a small bedroom/office. Forward is another odd-shaped closet, and on the right is another bedroom which adjoins, via a connecting door, to the adjacent bedroom (the one on the right from before, you follow?).
When we first moved in, Jo was just turning two and of course Opie wasn’t born yet, although we hoped we’d have another child in the next few years. We were a little stumped, at first, about how to allocate the bedrooms. Except for the office, they are all about the same size. The stand-alone one was already painted an incredibly girlie shade of pink. Of the adjoined rooms, one is a bit brighter (it has two exposures) but its closet is outside the room and doesn’t have much hanging space. Also (see below) it had this crazy coral-with-white-stencils thing going on which mayyyyybe could have worked for an adult room but not a kid’s. The neighboring room–it was yellow then–has some nice built-ins and a good closet. We thought about making it the master and giving Jo the pink room, and turning the tangerine!! room into some kind of den or sitting room. But then what would happen if/when we had another kid? Or we could give Jo the sunny room (who cares if a two-year-old has a closet) and keep the yellow one for ourselves. We’d be right next to each other, but could still close the adjoining doors, and we’d save the pink room for another child.
In the end, we took the pink room for ourselves (but painted it pronto) and for a year, Jo had herself a two-room suite. The yellow room, equipped with closet, became her bedroom, and the sunny room became a playroom.
I told you the paint job was wacky.
These days, that yellow room is–surprise!–pink. Opie has the adjoining, once-coral playroom (and no place to hang his clothes, but that’s yet to become an issue). You can see part of the set of connecting doors at that pink link. The kids get to be very close, but still have their own separate spaces. Tonight, we’ve dragged one of the mattresses from his trundle bed onto the floor of her room, and he’s sleeping in there. When we first put up that trundle bed, Jo slept in it for months, alongside her little brother. Lately, they’ve designated the spot behind the big armchair in his room their “office”; they sit back there and read books together and eat contraband candy. They haven’t yet learned to hide the wrappers.
I don’t know what we’ve done, if anything, to foster their closeness. Maybe they’re just different enough not to grate on each other too much: one boy, one girl, three years apart in age. Maybe we said some magic words once upon a time that have kept rivalry largely at bay, thus far (universe, please notice my caveats). Maybe they were just born with compatible temperaments. Maybe we’re just lucky.
Or maybe it’s that double door, the one that lets them have their own special relationship, different from any other they have with parents or teachers or friends or other relatives. They’re a team within a team, and they have the clubhouse to prove it.
It’s my spy lookout, my scenic view, my alone space, my social (networking) place, my home office. It’s where I eat, work, chat, and play. It’s where I live: in front of my laptop, at my dining room table, looking through my front windows to the street and park beyond.
Today’s #best09 prompt is “best place” of 2009. I knew it had to be somewhere at home. I love going out, I love traveling and seeing both new and familiar people and places. But I also crave the comfortable cocoon of home. I need to be surrounded by my own stuff in my own rambly old house.
I used to work in a little bedroom upstairs on a desktop. Three years ago, we bought laptops and I still planned to stay in my office, with the bigger monitor and my own private desk that I wouldn’t have to clear every evening. But when the laptop arrived, I flipped it open on the dining room table and I’ve never gone back to the office. Here, I love being able to look out the windows–in front, where I’ll see ice-fishing shanties being towed to the lake soon. And at the side, where my neighbor’s kids come outside in all manner of silly outfits and play with their puppy.
When I sit down in the morning with my first cup of tea, I swear I sometimes sigh with the relief and anticipation of a few hours of work/Web time. And since I’ve needed that relief more than ever this year, this has to be my #best09 place.
I am a really fairly relaxed housekeeper, but every single night I scrub my bathroom sink, faucet, shelf, and surrounding walls. Because every single night they are covered with dried-up drops of toothpaste. I’m unclear on how this keeps happening. Does my family stand three feet away from the drain when they spit? Do they actually aim at the walls, instead of the inside of the sink? Do they spit into their hands, then shake them like a wet dog? Do they spit onto the dog herself, prompting her to perform the shake-n-spray maneuver?
You can buy tooth-whitening toothpaste, organic toothpaste, enamel-shielding toothpaste, tartar-protecting toothpaste, and mouthwash-infused toothpaste. You can buy toothpaste in flavors from watermelon to bubble gum to vanilla mint (um, gross).
What you cannot buy is toothpaste that dries clear when it ends up on your dark green walls. Somebody needs to get on that.
Remember when we talked about old houses? Here are some of the kooky things I like about mine. (Click on any of them to learn more and see the full set @ Flickr.)
Staying at my mom’s temporary hangout recently cemented my feelings on new houses. I don’t like them. Or, to be fair, I wouldn’t want to live in one if I could possibly avoid it, but I know not everyone shares this opinion. When we moved to Mayberry, I wouldn’t let our real estate agent show us any, despite a lot of nagging on her part. I don’t like the way newer homes are so matchy with all the other houses on the block. I don’t like the way they swallow up their lots, leaving little outdoor space. I don’t like the excess: huge, specialized rooms that go unused; more bathrooms than there are family members; extra refrigerators stashed on each level, greedily sucking electricity.
Most of all, for the love of God, I do not like the enormous mirrors in the bathroom that force me to ponder my nakedness daily. Give me a good old-fashioned medicine cabinet over the sink any day.
My 90-year-old house has a choppy layout, a detached garage, a ventilation system that baffles most heating contractors, and no master bath (yes: we grown-ups share a bathroom with our children!). But it has charm like nobody’s business, and I don’t have to see myself in the altogether after each and every shower.
I think most people are either old-house types or new-house types, and rarely the twain shall, you know, switch teams. Which one are you?
I am not talking about the real kind of spring cleaning (heaven forfend). I am lucky if I remember to change the sheets regularly, and our windows haven’t been washed in at least two years.
But even though it’s still freezing cold, with snow predicted for the next two days, I am on an out-with-the-old roll lately. I am mercilessly cutting Bloglines subscriptions; I just can’t follow over 100 blogs anymore (but I’m sure yours is still on there). We are meeting with the accountant today to finally wrap up our 2008 taxes. I am changing my habits by shredding every day and being more thoughtful about what I eat. I am actually keeping alive the two new plants that recently came to live in our house. I am itching to put away my sweaters and corduroys in favor of skirts and t-shirts.
I can’t decide what to do with all of the baby and maternity clothes, though. I know I am placing a lot of pressure on myself to make a decision, but it’s driving me crazy to have all this stuff around. If we’re done, I’d like to try to move on, to celebrate the new time and space it might create in our lives while also mourning the babies, real and imagined, we’ll never have. If we’re not done, well, time’s a-wasting, you know? Limbo is just not a place I like to be.
Even though I have a perfectly good, dedicated home office space, every day I work at my dining room table. I sit in the seat that allows me to look through the living room and out the front windows, to the yard and to the park across the street. Just outside the window is a plant called a Tree of Heaven, which my sister the horticulturist informs me is called “Tree of Hell” by those in the trade–because it can be invasive and is nearly impossible to remove or kill.
It’s pretty, though, isn’t it?
Our back yard is dominated by two towering trees–a shagbark hickory (on the right below) and an oak (at the bottom of the frame is our garage). These are two of the many reasons I wouldn’t trade living in an old house.
Yes, that’s a lot of leaves. But here’s what we learned from our neighbor: Just crunch ‘em up with a lawnmower and leave them. Forget raking!
Thanks to Jenny from Nyack Backyard for inspiring this post! It’s a front door/back door meme started by dlyn. If you want to join in, just step our your front door and snap a photo, then do the same in the back. Leave your link at dlyn’s.
… of the fact that our refrigerator died over the weekend.
We do have a spare refrigerator in the basement, and a chest freezer.
My husband moved everything down there.
(I later paid him back by being the one to find a disgusting dog accident and clean it up.)
My husband also cleaned behind and under the fridge after I asked him to move it for me so I could do it.
We haven’t had to throw away any food yet.
I will probably lose 5 pounds from a) all the trips back and forth to the basement and b) the deterrence factor of said trips.
The repairman is on his way.
If the fridge is salvageable, it will be the cleanest it’s been in years, since I’ll scrub it sparkling before I refill it.
If it’s not, I just read that October is the best month to get a good deal on new appliances.
It’s not yet cold enough to keep our perishables on the porch.
[grudgingly] I guess I feel a little better. Anything I forgot?
Update, Tuesday: After $62 and the removal of two handfuls of dust and a magnetic dart from inside the bottom of the fridge … it works fine. My husband is mourning the loss of his stainless steel dreams.
