First Day of Summer Vacation!

Everyone is finally done with school. so it's official - Summer is here and we are ready to kick it in gear! On Wednesday I finally looked at the family economy blog that Nicole told me about a few weeks ago - a new system that she is using. I called Nicole when I was driving Wesley to band practice on Wednesday and we talked about it again and then I pulled over to look up the link which she had already sent me a few times that I still hadn't looked at! I told her I needed to do it now before I got distracted again. I pulled over in the shade and read about it on my phone while Owen and Daniel napped in the car for a few minutes. Then I drove by a bank and got a few (is 12 a few?) blank check registers for our family to use. When I got home, I put the book "The Entitlement Trap" on hold at the library, and started to figure out our family's economy. Yesterday I had the first draft ready to go!

I was going to use 4 cleaning/chore "zones" like she talked about on that Raise The Good website, but after fiddling with that and assigning two kids to an area and kinda dividing the area anyway, I figured it would be easier for us to have an area for each child, just to be clear and so they each know the specific area they are in charge of. Yesterday I worked out the kinks, finished up this paper above, printed out a few copies, and we are all ready to go on Monday! I'm excited. This is actually pretty similar to the clipboard system we used in the fall when I was on top of it and feeling unstoppable and getting the kids involved. There is a link at that link of my chore chart for the kids in November. If you open it, you'll see the similarities to the one above. That one worked really well, but it got too much for me to follow through to keep them accountable. The parental follow up I think is really the key ingredient to any family chore system. So I do believe this new way will help them be more motivated and responsible (via bigger payments) plus it's easier for me to follow up on. I have an alarm set at 9 to check who is not awake, an alarm for 10 to check rooms, and then the other things don't have any more deadlines during the day until 9pm when we gather for scriptures. and I really think this system wilthink this will be better because it's more simple and will be easier for the kids to follow through with and for me to check up on to hold us all accountable. So day 1 is Monday, the teenagers are kinda shrugging their shoulders though cause the boys are leaving for high adventure on Tuesday and Mel is leaving for girls camp on Wednesday, but we gotta start, so we'll see how it work with the younger kids next week and I hope this works! Fingers crossed. As long as I show up each day and follow through, I think the kids will too.