the job chart

Today my plan was to post about our super-duper-nature-journal-making-and-using home school group activity that I was scheduled to host, but it had to be canceled because poor Ian threw up 4 times last night (in the toilet! hooray!) and it was 40 degrees with thunder and hail outside. So on to plan B.

Since I posted about our new magnet board I’ve actually had quite a few people e-mail me with questions about our job chart. You must understand that I am not a very good housekeeper. I am completely organizationally challenged, inconsistent, and naturally a slob. I love things to be neat and organized, to be clean and sparkly, but making myself do actual cleaning and organizing has been one of my life long struggles. Fortunately I married a saint who has self discipline in spades. I have improved on my house keeping skills a lot since we got married and I’ve matured and realized how much I really do like order, but I’ve certainly got a long way to go.

First off– it’s just a magnetic dry-erase board. I used printable magnet sheets I found at Office Max to print the words on which I designed with Pages, our desktop publishing program on our Mac.

Any system we have to keep our house in order around here has to be really simple. There are a few things the kids are expected to do every morning– get dressed, make beds, and pick up clothes and toys off of their floors. I have to reiterate these expectations on a near daily basis. That and the rule NO READING BEFORE BREAKFAST. Every morning the 3 big kids work together to unload the dishwasher and then as the day goes on everyone rinses and loads their own dishes. The dishwasher, not the sink or counter, is the dirty dish receptacle.

A couple of times a day (at roughly 12 and 4) we do a “clean up” where everyone works as hard as they can for 10 minutes to pick up and tidy the main floor rooms of the house. This helps me relax a bit about the inevitable mess of having 5 kids home all day because I know they’ll help get it under control.

Then evening rolls around and that is where the job chart comes in. The kids rotate helping with dinner clean-up on weekdays. The dinner chores are the only ones on the chart that consistently get done. Laundry is on there, but it is just one of those battles I haven’t figured out how to fight quite yet. (I did try Jessica’s once a week laundry day thing for about 4 weeks, but I just couldn’t do ALL the laundry a family of 7 produces, do school, and make meals in one day. I have yet to find something I can really stay on top of.)

On Saturdays Barry helps the kids really clean their rooms before anyone can go downstairs in morning and the bathroom chores rotate between kids each week. So, whoever has mirrors cleans all the mirrors in all the bathrooms, whoever has toilets cleans all 3 toilets (and the surrounding floor), and the counters person does all the sinks and counters in all 3 bathrooms. Sometimes I’ll make a list of chores that REALLY need to be done in addition to those and we all work on those too. Vacuuming just gets done when it looks like we need to (which is a few times a week in the main rooms because we have a big dog who SHEDS). Our sliding glass door is covered in fingerprints and dog-nose prints more often than not. We’re lucky if dusting gets done once a month.

This helps us get all the necessities done for health and basic decluttering, but our house is by no means spic and span. I seriously could spend hours everyday cleaning, but I don’t want to, and I really don’t think I need to. There will be a season when I’ll miss all the mess makers and won’t even remember the mess. Right now I’m just striving for peace and order, with as little effort as possible.

And I try really, really hard not to compare myself and my home to my friend’s who are obsessively neat and clean with perfectly arranged living rooms and decorated walls.

I usually feel pretty good about where I’m at.

daring jumping spider

After I got out of the shower this morning I heard Jonah exclaiming “I caught it! I caught it!” He did tell me a few times yesterday that there was a big, cool spider by his window, but I didn’t think much about it. He caught it this morning and he and Logan did all they could to learn who exactly their bedroom visitor was. This is what I found on the table when I sat down for breakfast:

They used their field guide searching skills and discovered they had a Daring Jumping Spider. Jonah made him a habitat in a jar. Logan drew a picture. All the boys went out in the rain in search of small insects to feed him.

I love it when stuff like this happens with absolutely no input (or interference) from me. I hadn’t even eaten breakfast yet and I could count it as a good school day.

a quilt for baby Hazel

My good friend RaeLyn had her 5th baby last month. I’m so hit or miss with baby gifts– sometimes not getting them done until the baby is 8 months old, or 1 year old, but this time I delivered the gift to a 3 week old baby! Pretty good, huh?

I love the painterly style of Laura Gunn’s fabrics. You can tell they’re made straight from her paintings with the texture of the paint and canvas right there on the fabric. I’ve had a half yard of these two prints staring at me from a shelf for a LONG time and finally had the right idea coincide with the right time to make a quilt, so I cut into it.

I had a fun time with my design– making the border echo the shape of the blocks. I quilted the middle part in swirls and then went around the outside a few times with straight lines. I really like how it turned out. It’s especially fun to sew for someone you know will appreciate the thought and time and be just as giddy about the pretty fabric as I am.

The back is another Laura Gunn print– lots of dots in the perfect colors.

Baby quilts are such a good size to play with and FINISH. I need to find some fabric I love to make a few for this little girl kicking my ribs.

time to breathe

Today was a day I’m thankful I don’t send my kids to school everyday. (The oldest 3 just go on Mondays.) The school year is winding down, so there were class parties that needed treats prepared for, teacher gifts to remember, and the regular making of lunches, nagging to get shoes on, and feeding and clothing the littlest boys in order to get in the car and to school on time. I am not a person that thrives on busy-ness and, quite frankly, getting 5 kids ready to get in the car is not my favorite thing to do. Believe it or not, these little people all have minds of their own, and as much as I’d like them to immediately follow my every command when we’re trying to get out the door and somewhere ON TIME, they don’t. By the time I had got them to school I was tired out for the day– but I had one appointment after another ahead of me.

And so Hunter and Ian and I were go, go, go until the big kids got home. Then it was driving to karate, picking up from karate, Dad working late, wrestling matches in the family room gone awry (with at least 3 kids screaming like they were dying at one time), trying to figure out something for dinner, and feeling unsettled by the whirlwind of papers and toys and pillows and blankets strewn about the house.

I thought– there are people that do this every day– that have every minute scheduled, rushing from school to lesson to appointment to hectic meal where there is no real time together because those brief moments are spent hurriedly trying to get things done so you can all move on to the next thing. And then I was overcome with gratitude for this path that I’m on where, for more days than not, we can go at our own pace, be intimately familiar with each other, and the kids can draw and draw and draw and read and read and read. I thought of these pictures of Hunter

who can spend all the time he wants intensely making his 2 year old “space men” and “lightnings”, who every minute has big brothers who draw with him and for him

and with their big brother magic (and some paper and tape) turn him into a “lightning space man”.

I’m thankful for all the unscheduled time to just be, to be real, to be really together.

I’m thankful for time to breathe.