Something that works...

I've thought about posting this before and reading another mother's blog today spurred me to action. This is one idea that we have been using for years and it really works well for us. The kids really regulate themselves with dishwasher duty and knowing which bathroom is theirs to clean. We still have to remind them about things and prod them along with the bathrooms especially but this helps a lot. It erases a lot of the fighting and arguing over what is fair and whose turn it is. 

I got the idea from Merrilee Boyack's book on raising kids. Each kid is assigned a number for the month. In our house this number delineates who you sit next to at the dinner table (Bob and I sit in the same places always), when you go to piano lesson, which bathroom you clean, which part of the dishwasher you unload, which part of the table you set, etc. As you can see the kids have taken it over and made it messy. Each month the roles change and everyone gets to do an equal share of the harder tasks (they all dislike master bathroom duty!)

We also just implemented another idea that is really easy for dish duty. We were always struggling to know whose dish night it was. One of the older kids is supposed to help wash dishes and load the dishwasher each night. So our new plan makes them do math and is easy to keep track of. We take the date and divide it by 3. If it divides evenly by 3 like today (the 3rd), then it is Parker's dish night (he is also the 3rd child). If when dividing the date by 3 you get a remainder of 1, then it is Allie's dish night (1st child). If it has a remainder of 2, then it is Caden's dish night (2nd child). They haven't yet discovered the inequality of something like the 31st and 1st coming back to back but I'm sure they will eventually.