Month: August 2019

Kids Can Work!

August 30, 2019

My husband grew up without chores. I kid you not. His mother had some philosophy about her husband’s household (13 kids by the time they stopped) having far too many jobs, and somehow equated that with her children needing none.

My upbringing was more typical: keep your room clean, rotating dishes assignment, and more labor-intensive Saturday Jobs. Even with that; my mother did the floors, toilets, laundry, and decorating.

When I first birthed a child, I had no plans or outlines for his future chores. When he started being mobile and ‘helped’ anyway, I began formulating rough ideas.

My first assisted me with:

  1. Unloading the dishwasher
  2. Sorting and folding laundry
  3. Watering or weeding the yard outside
  4. Vacuuming
  5. Dusting
  6. Toy pick up

In practical application; that meant:

  1. Putting some plastic items away and being chased after for removing a glass dish and running
  2. Swimming through the clothes, usually without any on his person
  3. Playing with everything, especially mud, and needing a bath within five minutes
  4. Fighting over how to run a vacuum over carpet, since he did not want to follow any sort of grid
  5. Waaaay too much polish
  6. “I’m too tiiiii-iiiiired to pick up!”

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Not that I didn’t persist. After all, he always tailed me and wanted someone to do something with him all day.

What’s been interesting to me is that years and years of chore expectations and (sometimes sporadic) patterns of assigned jobs has led to them all (A) knowing chores are expected and (B) teaching the younger brothers by example.

Today, I can whip out a chore chart my FIVE YEAR OLD can do; jobs that include:

  1. Clean the bathroom (toilets, sink, counter, mirror, floor; refill soap and TP; empty garbage)
  2. Fold and put away your clothes (including hanging up dress clothes)
  3. Dust and polish the furniture (they still use enough polish to slide off the railings)
  4. Unload and load the dishwasher (a lot of spilled water, but they do it)
  5. Pick up and vacuum a room

The moral of the story? No matter how tiiii-iiiired the kids think they are, they actually are capable. No matter how reticent you feel to assign something as monumental as toilets, they can learn to do it.

Most importantly: no matter how much of a favor you think you’re doing your children by not assigning jobs, THEIR WIVES WILL WANT TO KILL YOU IF YOU DID NOT TEACH THEM.

 

Photo Credits:
Image by LaterJay Photography from Pixabay
Image by truthseeker08 from Pixabay

 

©2019 Chelsea Owens

Food Tip 10

August 28, 2019

Do you make your own compost? I mean, from your leftover vegetables and fruits?

We do, but not in the over-the-top way one might think. If I have a life mantra, it’s probably something about not being worth it if it takes too much time and effort. Hence, our simple composting method:

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Back when we purchased the house six years ago I had the bright idea to stop throwing all our garbage to the garbage. I’d heard that organic materials could be used for compost. I like the idea of less waste, a better planet, and reusing instead of re-polluting. Lo and behold, someone was selling a compost bin in the Classifieds (online)!

I purchased and picked up the large, square, black container and we’ve randomly contributed to it since.

When I make dinner with potatoes or soup with celery, I collect the peels and plant pieces and carry them out to Mr. Bin. We also rinse out eggshells and add those, or sometimes dump in small branches from pruning. I’ve added compostable egg cartons before, too.

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We’ve stirred and smashed, but mostly leave it (remember the “too much effort” mantra?). There’s a door at the bottom of the black container from which we can retrieve the broken-down bits of green and brown waste –compost.

It’s like magic, plus I feel like Supermom. The kids learn to put their banana peels out back and then love to pull the compost for their vegetable-planting in the spring.

 

©2019 Chelsea Owens