…wash the dishes dry the dishes…

Sometimes, I wonder if it’s really worth the effort to get kids doing chores. I know it’s a good thing, it is teaching them valuable life skills, it is forming them up into functional, capable adults…but man oh man, I could really do without the constant moaning and whining and reminding and bickering and…like, could we just do it with a bit of grace occasionally and it might actually be done quicker than all the carry on.

With a new school year, comes new chores, and this year we have completely rejigged how we do chores, and now have a daily rotation so no-one can whinge that they hate their allocated chore, and whatever they have to do, they know they only have to deal with it for that day.

Originally, I was The Keeper Of The Chores, and would be reminding everyone three or more times a day what they were supposed to be doing. As one can imagine, this wore thin within approximately 47 minutes. I needed a new, mummy-free solution, with a couple of simple caveats – it needed to be low fuss (so preferably not a white board I would have to rub out and re-write constantly), and it had to be cute (because why bother with anything else?).

And so it was, when I was in the “big smoke” a week or two ago, Master 6 & I found ourselves at a loose end after dropping the three big kids off at an excursion. “What should we do?” I asked. “Can we go to K Mark?” “what would you like to go to K Mart for?” “just to look at stuff”…that, my sweet boy, is indeed the exact purpose of a “K Mark” trip, and so off we went. I found myself in the homewares section, as I needed to pick up a couple of  bits & pieces for the farm cabin, when I came across a simple wooden frame, 6×8″ in size, and the wood just the right colour to fit in with various other wood accents in our home. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and into my basket fell the frame. Don’t you hate it when stores have magnetic baskets like that? I find Spotlight is particularly bad for it.

It ended up being a super quick project – lettering with a Sharpie paint pen, a piece of long-stashed patterned paper, and a generous amount of hot glue to fix magnets to scrabble tiles, and washers to the back board of the frame. Mounted on the wall, this cute little magnetic chore chart has been working a treat for three weeks now, and now I only need to do one nudge to say “time to do your chores” and they are on to it. No. More. Nagging. Or micro managing. Huzzah!

Now that I have my nagging time back, and school is done for the day, I’m planning on making a cup of tea, and getting hooked into a new book… the biggest problem now is “which one?”!!