Help! Around the House 6

The home is the first and finest classroom.

What are our Goals?

Before we launch into the details of getting kids to clean, let's take a minute to put our goals in perspective:

1. A home is to live in, not live for. We sometimes pay more attention to what the house looks like than who lives in it. Kids use and appreciate a home more than most adults. As we grow older, our home often becomes more a matter of vanity, necessity, and financial burden. But kids love homes, so let them use their houses to grow and do! If we had more fingerprints on the walls at home, we'd have less on the police blotters downtown.

2. There is nothing wrong with making a mess. If kids are going to learn to build and overhaul, sew, paint, invent, whittle, or wrestle - do just about anything - they are going to create some kind of mess. Mess is creativity's constant shadow. Cooking, having pets, and pursing projects all mean messes. Making a mess is no crime. It's part of life, and often the bigger the mess, the bigger the blessing. The problem is not in making a mess but in leaving it behind for someone else.

3. The real goal in all of this is better kids and family, not cleaner closets.

Help! Around the House 5

"Cleaning is more than just the physical arrangement of objects; it involves the mental arrangement of our lives, and habits that make us happy or sad. When you think about it, you'll find that the concepts of order and neatness have profound power. You aren't teaching an act; you are teaching a principle of self-responsibility. The actual picking up is just the mechanics of it. the spirit of it is consideration, kindness, self-respect, and service. That is what cleaning is all about. Cleaning can set a pattern for the organization and responsibility in our children's whole lives."

Thanks . . .

. . . to the two of you who told me you read this! :-) How encouraging to know I'm not just writing into thin air.

Here in VT, summer is as short as the winter is long. And boy is the summer pleasant and wonderful. (NB I do enjoy winter but the fact that we do have four seasons is a lot of that!)

Well, I bring this up because now that the late April snow (yup - did I forget to mention that?) and the Mother's Day snowflakes, and the killing frosts are behind us (well, more than likely behind us), summer has arrived. I finally found my shorts Friday afternoon (several days into the 80+ degree weather) and I even wore them. I got sunburned sitting outside at a baseball game on Saturday afternoon (and I was doing all I could to be in the shade! It was HOT.) The house has heated up and we finally got the storm windows in the storm doors switched over to the screens (either Friday or Saturday - whenever it was we needed it!)

We need to enjoy the summer days even though school's not out, just in case it's a cold and wet one like last year . So we cooked hot dogs outside over the firepit (on sticks of course) one evening in the backyard (marshmallows too). We've had corn on the cob a few times (even though it's obviously imported). Tonight we had homemade potato salad and watermelon. And we're loving the breeze. :-) The garden is coming along but not quite in (we held off a bit due to the snow...!) Hopefully that'll be planted in the next day or two, still before the May 31st frost-date. Yay!

Help! Around the House 4

"Every pattern and attitude we acquire in one area of our life carries over into other areas. If we dodge our chores as kids, we're likely to do the same in our marriage and our career. If we grow up wasting things, we may well be wasteful of time and life later. The quitter on the kids' leaf-raking team will probably be the quitter on the sales-analysis team at work. People who never learned to see a mess around them won't recognize a problem when it happens in their business, health, or marriage.

We spend most of our time at home. If we learn there to ignore commitments and promises, to be insensitive to others' needs, we'll carry those habits right along with us to the outside world. . . . If we only did housework for one reason - the incalculable value of carryover - it would be worth it."

Flaming Question Marks

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Does anyone actually read this blog? Just wondering.

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Celebrations and the like

As the school year winds down, there are always plenty of "lasts" and "celebrations". Here's a short list (all recent past, present, or near future - I won't bother to differentiate). We have or will attend most of them. Most of them are

• Last Four Winds (a monthly environmental science program I help teach for kindergarten and 3rd grade)
• Field trips to look at frogs and toads
• Student-led conferences (where each of the kids give us an overview of what they have accomplished and done this year - as compared to parent-teacher conferences...)
  
• 3rd grade Field trip to the ECHO museum - subject: geology
• Last home group (bible study) for the year
• Awana Closing Ceremonies - celebrating a year's achievement and the completion of books for all 4 of our kids. It was by far our best year "habit-wise." Bravo kids! NB: Patience has one more year and one more book to go to earn the Timothy Award - a very big deal and she's almost there!
• 3rd grade Field trip to Shelburne Museum - This was a highlight for Patience and I two years ago and I'm really looking forward to it with Andante.
• Last pre-school story time at the library
  
• School BBQs
• Class trips to the park (kind of a field day/picnic thing, each grade on a separate day)
  
• Shiloh's 20th college reunion - going back to old nassau! (ok, so we do this most years, but this is a big one, and it's the first major reunion I'm going to since my 5th!)
  
• 3rd grade talent show - a tradition at the last school assembly, often the last or near last day of school. They are the "big kids" at their school and this is their "Goodbye" to all their younger friends. Andante has signed up to play a piano piece.
  
• Strings concert (Patience w/her viola)
• 4th & 5th grade musical concert (Patience - chorus)
• Last home reading book project (this one will be a skit done with a friend about Andrew Clemens' book "Lunch Money")
  
• Last Cross connections (a mom's group that meets monthly at our church)
• Orientations and parent meetings and move-up days (New Beginnings Days) in preparation for next year
  
• Piano recital (Patience and Andante, both)
• Home group BBQ
• The last day of school (last but not least, June 16th)
  

And of course, there's plenty more going on that won't end, like putting in our garden and baseball that's also keeping us busy. It's all very fun and we look forward to what will hopefully be some "lazy days of summer" soon!

Help! Around the House 3

"Regardless of age, intelligence, or cultural background, if a [child grows up and learns] just one thing it will almost guarantee success. What is it? 'I am responsible for my own actions.' Once you accept ownership of your own actions and their consequences, you can work the rest of life out pretty well.

But if you come out of school and go out into life believing that there is always going to be someone out there to take care of things for you, to follow behind you and clean up your mess (your parents, nannies, the government, the church, the boss, the bank, the lawyers, and so on) it's bad news. Young people go off to college to learn how to manage a business when they can't even manage the aftermath of their own daily grooming. When they find themselves fouled up - scholastically, financially, socially, or emotionally - they don't know what to do, because someone has always looked after their needs before.

Forever picking up after kids or anyone else is the most character-weakening thing you can do, for it teaches them that they don't have to answer for their own behavior."