Chores
Household Organization
Natural / Non-Toxic Products
Chores
Managers of Their Chores book review
I'm sure many of you are familiar with Steve & Terri Maxwell! They have my all-time favorite books and resources! I love their family's philosophy towards life. It really comes through in one of their more recent books, "Managers of Their Chores". If you have Managers of Their Homes" you know how helpful their organizational ideas are. "Managers of Their Chores" goes further into detail on how to get your family organized to complete all household chores together.
I love how Terri explains in detail the reasoning for why children should do chores biblically. I already agreed with the fact that they need to do chores, but reading her philosophy went beyond the basics of chores being good training etc. It talks about how our culture is so focused on pleasure and having to have fun and how unbiblical that is. Chores train our children for the real world and help them to not be such self-seeking, pleasure-oriented people.
It also includes the details on how to organize what jobs need to be done and who should do them when. Best of all it includes a "chore pack" with plastic "badges" that the kids can clip onto themselves. Inside you put all the tasks they are to carry out throughout the day in order. As they accomplish the task, they move it to the back and do the next task. I know my children can get very distracted and forget what they're supposed to be doing so it's great to have something tangible for them to use to help them stay on task!
Terri has you work through a detailed process of deciding what jobs need to be done daily, weekly, monthly etc... around your house, figuring out how long they take to do, and then assigning them to your children (and yourself) for different chore times. Then they have a simple way to make up the chore cards on the computer for each child. It has been such a relief to have all the jobs that need to be done officially assigned! Then as long as we are consistent in having our chore times, and I'm dilligent in inspecting work (which Terri stresses as being very important), then all the work should get done regularly!
Anyways, hope that helps someone out! If you check out their site, you can't go wrong with anything you buy from them!
Household Organization
Storage Space Tip
If you're like me and are looking for extra space, here's one way to use space that may be unused. For us, our kids' closets don't have special closet organizers. Without these organizers, there's a lot of area unused under the hanging bar for the clothes. My kids' clothes that are hung don't take up much room so I have a lot of hanging space open. I was unpacking some linens today and decided to take each child's sheets and pillowcases and put them in a plastic bag with handles and then hang the handles around the top of a hangar and hang them in their closet. This frees up an entire linen closet shelf and keeps them hand in the room where they're being used! Hope that helps someone who is short on storage space!
Flexible Meals
One thing our family has learned to do well is to change our day around in non-traditional ways to meet the needs of our family. In order to save money and not go out to supper, we often will change our meals around so we do a supper-type meal for lunch and then have our sandwiches for supper when we're on the go. That way we don't end up going out to eat and spending money, or not doing things that we want to do, but would be too hard to do because of the supper hour.
For example, we need to drive in to town to go shopping and it's a big event. To make it easier, we'll have a big supper-type meal at lunch, then right after naptime we'll load up in the van and bring our sandwiches with to eat in the van. Tonight we're going to look at a couple houses that we may be interested in buying. We want to do this after our business hours, so we'll have a big lunch again and then eat our sandwiches in the van and have the home showings during the normal supper hour. We do this a lot in the summer if we go to the lake. Instead of trying to plan a big meal to bring along to the lake or out hiking, we'll just switch things around for the day.
The key is to do what makes sense, not what's traditional. Think out of the box about how things can be done better in different areas of life!
Managers Of Their Homes book review
How do we fit all the ingredients of our day together so that everything turns out and our day isn't a major "flop"? With spending time with God, spouse, children (maybe even one-on-one time occasionally), homeschooling, music lessons, outside commitments, cooking, chores........., it can seem overwhelming! Sometimes it's hard to tell if we're getting everything done that we need to or if things are getting missed that we should be doing.
That's why I appreciate using a great resource from Terri Maxwell called Managers Of Their Homes. This book takes you through all the different aspects of daily living and gives ideas for each area. Then it takes you through a process of scheduling your day. The first thing it recommends that you do when you start your planning is to take time to pray about what it is God would have you and each of your children doing each day or week. You take time to write down each of the things that need to be accomplished or scheduled and write down how long it takes. Then you can add it up and see if it totals more than 24 hours. If it does, you need to pray about what should be cut down.
After doing this, you then go through a process with their scheduling tools of putting together a schedule for your family. You write the daily events on pieces of paper and you sticky tack stuff to put them on a chart so you can move them around so that everyone's schedules fit together - i.e. mom can't be doing one-on-one homeschooling with 2 kids at the same time, or 2 kids can't be practicing piano at the same time.
Through this process, you come up with a workable schedule for the whole family and if the schedule is followed, all the things that the Lord has for you to be doing, will get accomplished at least most of the time! Of course it's not a perfect world so often something that should take 15 min. will get interrupted with discipline issues or some other interruption and things will get off. Of course the key is flexibility with the whole process so you're not so tied to the schedule that you get frustrated and angry when things get off. But without the plan, much less would get accomplished!
What a difference it has made in our family's life when we use a schedule! The children are much more content knowing what to expect in their day. They really thrive on the routine! See my blog's archives for our family's schedule (Feb. 2, Feb. 24, March 5 2007)!
Natural / Non-Toxic Products
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