Chores

                The past several days have been go go go… I finally get a chance to sit down and do what I want to do, and I realize (rather have been avoiding the fact that) the house is an absolute disaster. You cant walk two steps without stepping on a lego, there are no clean clothes or dishes, and no room in the kitchen to even think about cooking. And whose fault is it? Well, now there is the tricky question. The kids made 5/7ths of the mess, but at the same time, I as the mother have failed to teach them to pick up after themselves… at least failed to reinforce it anyway.

                So once again, frustrated with this disaster of a house, and unsure of how to really get the kids to help clean it up and keep it clean, I created a new rule… again… No electronics if the house is a mess. If you don’t want to help clean up, go outside and stay there. Then a secondary rule to this… If you help clean until mommy stops you can have your electronics for the rest of the day.

                My hope is to be able to actually get the house clean without having to redo anything because 5 children are not actively undoing everything. I did have one consistent helper… Brandon. Tracey and Arthur bounced in and out and picked up a little here and there. Once the house is clean, I am going to assign maintenance chores, where each day each person cannot do anything else unless their chore is taken care of for the day.

                Not sure how well this is going to work. Have tried other strategies before, but I, like everyone else in this house, have ADHD… which means that I have a bad problem with follow through. My motivation right now is that I am tired of living in a natural disaster area and tired of trying to fight the tornado on a daily basis as it runs its course through my home.