White Board

Our chore board is back, it came back earlier this week after a miserable weekend cleaning Dominic's room. His room smelled of rotten food and bodily fluids. After two days of cleaning and a day of shampooing and deodorizing the carpets it's much better. Before we head into the holiday vacation is a good time to start it back up anyway. Each night I check to make sure the items the kids had to do are done and erase those chores and add more. They each get two chores a day. (It's hard to work around 3 hours of gymnastics) But two chores, it seems, are easily accomplished. We've been doing okay. Only Ainsley had a backup of work on her bad day earlier this week, the chores roll over to the next day so instead of just two chores to do she ended up with three. It's incentive to do their chores, if they don't keep up with them they'll pile up. (much like life). The chores are pretty simple. Clean bathrooms, Empty or Load the dishwasher, Dust the TV or Piano, Pick up a room, Vacuum a room, Laundry... etc. I plan them appropriately, a simple one with a more difficult one.

For an extra incentive, we've had the goal of family games every night. If they get their homework done, reading done, and have finished their chores, all before 8:00 we get to play a game. Last night we played UNO, it's so fun now that all of the kids are old enough to read numbers, colors and match. It opens up a lot of family activities for us. We've only had two game nights this week, it is tough to get the work done with the extra activities we do. But, having them ending up rare is probably a good thing. They have to do the chore regardless of reward.

Winter Break will be a test, holidays and illness always throw the white board off. Those are the events that shut down our routine. Sometimes it could be an unplanned night out that destroys the board. We'll see how it goes.

Ainsley has been doing well with her morning plan. But, she has not really been tested yet. Every morning this week has been a 2 hour delay. We won't face that challenge until January it seems.