Your Fun Family

I recently joined The Blog Frog and it is certainly addictive. I am new so I would like to join the communities of other bloggers and have people join mine.

If you are on The Blog Frog please leave a link in a comment here so I can join your community. If you want to join my Your Fun Family Community on there I would love it.

If you have no idea what I am talking about I will try to sum it up...

You join, you add a widget to your blog, and then you have a community your readers can join and you can join other people's blog communities. Many members (I do) have a widget with recent visitors so if you log in to The Blog Frog and then visit their blog you will show up with a link to your blog.

If you join other blog communities you can talk in their forums and a link to your blog shows up with every comment. Your new blog posts and Twitter updates show up in their community too. I have been addicted to the forums and have been getting new traffic from it.

Long story short, If you are a member or join now please let me know. I would like to make more friends on it since I am new to it.

As children grow they go through many stages. Many of these stages drive us crazy! One of these stages that many children go through is a regression back into the baby stage. Just as your baby starts to turn into a big kid they claim that they can no longer do all of the things they learned and they need you to do it all for them.

They just got some independence and it gave you a tiny bit of time to yourself. Then all of a sudden you are back to square one. Maybe they miss being your pampered baby. Maybe they realize that the rest of their life is downhill once they are expected to do everything for themselves. Whatever the reason, as parents we want our "big kid" back.

I have one tip for this stage that is assured to help out. The main idea is to get your child excited about doing things for themselves again. You can do this by creating a "big kid" chart or making a "big kid" jar.

Simply create a list of all of the things that your child should be able to do for themselves. Make a chart with this list or tape it to a jar. If you make a chart the child can add a sticker every time they accomplish a big kid task. If you make a jar they can add any object or just a penny to the jar.

At the end of the week they can count up all of their big kid tasks and get a prize. They will get excited again about being a big kid. They may even surprise you and find new things that they can do to get big kid points.

There has been a lot of talk about getting housework done in the communities I visit lately. #1 - I would say GET OFF THE COMPUTER!

Okay I am obviously just kidding because I spend way too much time online and I would hate it if my readers spent less time online and did not have time to read me.

Most of you know that I have the lazy approach to almost everything. Ironically, I work hard at finding the lazy way to do things. I make laziness an art form. So what would you expect from me other than a lazy approach to housework?

All moms struggle with how to have time for kids and housework. I love spending time with my kids and hate housework. No child will grow up and look back at their childhood and say, "Mom always had a spotless house". They will however remember how much fun you had together.

When my girls were little I had a strategy. I made a point to stop what I was doing every hour and get a quick chore done. I also never cleaned anything that would get dirty again through the day. Then 30 minutes before James would get home I would race through the house putting things in baskets and cleaning.

I still have baskets. It is like filing toys and clutter. I file things away in baskets according to what room they should be in and put them in that room. Now that my kids are older we even have a clean laundry basket for each child. I separate laundry into the baskets and when the kids get home from school they have their own baskets of laundry to put away.


*To read more about our family chore lists check out our Daily Chores post.

*Also make sure to enter our Current Giveaways.

I do not think any one way of organizing chores works for everyone. We have gone through many ways of organizing chores. We keep changing as I learn what works with my kids.

I will begin by saying that I do not pay my kids for doing chores. James has been known to give them money to do things from time to time but I will not. Part of being a family is helping each other. You should not have to be paid to help out. I already spend way too much money on my kids.

If they ever complain I just ask them if they would rather get paid an allowance and then have to buy everything for themselves. They quickly realize how little they could afford and change their mind. If they want extra money for things they know that they then must also do extra work.

We have done spreadsheets with each child having assigned chores each day. At first they changed what jobs they did everyday. They then complained about the person before them not doing a good job so they had to do more work.

I then had two different ones and they changed jobs back and forth each week. This meant they got to change jobs once in awhile but could only blame themselves if a job was not done well the day before. They still did not like all of the jobs and I would get busy and not keep track of what spreadsheet they should be on.

Through time the whole system changed to what we do now. Each child has things that they would rather do and are better at so we sat down and chose permanent chores. I wrote down all of the jobs that I want done on a daily bases and made sure to make it an even list. We then all sat down and split them up. The girls talked it out and decided who got what.

My life has gotten soooo much easier with this method. The girls all have things they are in charge of so when they see it needs to get done they do it. If they get busy and forget I just say that something needs to get done and the person who has that job does it.

On special cleaning days I make a list of jobs. I am sure to make them all even so everyone will get around the same amount of work. Then I am done and my "cleaning fairies" go to work. I let them choose and initial one job on the list and start working on it. Then they do not get to choose the next job until they finish the first one. This continues until the last job is done.

They become super fast cleaning fairies because they do not want to be stuck with a job they do not like. The big one is cleaning up after the dogs. The child that cleans the slowest is on pooper scooper duty. This turns even the laziest child into a fast cleaner. I even use this when kids do not want to get up for school. I inform the children that the last child fully dressed has pooper scooper duty after school. In a flash I have 3 fully dressed kids that are ready for school.

When my kids were little I had a simple rule. You can whine all you want but you have to do it in your own room. I think the normal no whining rule is not healthy. It tells kids that they can not get upset. You want your child to learn when it is okay to be upset.

Kids are full of emotions and they have to learn how to handle them or they grow up to be adults that still can not handle their emotions. (I see them everyday)

When my kids started to whine I would say, "I understand that you are upset but it is not something that is important enough to put you in such a bad mood and ruin your day. I want to have a good day and have fun so if you want to continue to whine you have to do it in your room."

I did not physically force them into their rooms because that escalates the emotional outburst. They do not have to ever actually go to their room they just need to know that they can not whine anywhere else.

When I was done talking I would just walk away and continue with what I was doing. If they came up to me a second time I would remind them that they could whine all they want but they have to do it in their room.

After that if it continued I would just ignore them. They do it for attention. If they do not get the attention they want they stop. It helps if they see you doing something that they want to do. Then they really see that whining is a waste of time and they could be doing something more fun.

It takes time for them to catch on but they will learn that whining is pointless.

Well yesterday was my second round of unfollowing on Twitter. You may remember awhile back that I unfollowed all of the annoying people that Tweet every five seconds about stupid stuff. I really have no interest in your bowel movements by the way.

Well, yesterday I unfollowed everyone that did not follow me back. I really am finding Twitter to be a waste of time and space. It is like a huge crowd full of people yelling but no one is listening. I still keep following people who's sites I like out of politeness. I also follow almost every person that follows me. There are some exceptions. I have no interest in following some internet whore that is trying to become a porn queen. They always seem to follow me though. It must be my big 80s hair that gets them.

To cut this shorter, I will say that I am sick of people just following me so that I will follow them back. Then they unfollow right after. So I am starting a new weekly routine. Every Wednesday I will be going to Huitter and doing their free manual version of Mutuality. I will dump all of the people that are not following me to make room for new people. If you have not used it yet...It is super fast and simple.

Any one that wants an assured follow back simply needs to follow me and keep me on follow. If you would like to let other people know that you are a guaranteed follow back leave a comment with your Twitter name so other people can follow you.

We have a winner to announce in the Vinyl Banner Giveaway!

The winner is Luvdaylilies! Congrats!

Thank you to UPrinting for sponsoring this blog and providing us with tons of products and giveaways. We are still doing giveaways so make sure to check out our Current Giveaways.

We have a winner to announce in the 250 Custom Printed Stickers Giveaway!

The winner is 1stopmom! Congrats!

Thank you to UPrinting for sponsoring this blog and providing us with tons of products and giveaways. We are still doing a lot of giveaways so make sure to check out our Current Giveaways.

We have a winner to announce in the 100 Custom Printed Postcards Giveaway!

The winner is Anne from Small Town Mommy! Congrats Anne!

Thank you to UPrinting for sponsoring this blog and providing us with tons of products and giveaways. We are still doing a lot of giveaways so make sure to check out our Current Giveaways.

Now that we lost all of our old shows and movies we found ourselves stuck not knowing what to watch when we had free time. I totally forgot about Charter's On Demand. When the girls were young On Demand was like a miracle for me. The girls would really want to watch a certain kids show and I could play show after show for them anytime they wanted.

It was wonderful when the kids were sick and could not stay asleep at night. There is not much for kids to watch at night but On Demand gave them all of their favorites shows anytime. It would help them fall asleep and help me get some much needed rest.

I also love the free movies. They always have great old movies that I can force my kids to watch with me.

If you would like more info about On Demand you can learn more at charter.net/ondemand. You can also get updates and fun extras on Charter’s Facebook page

Why end the carving fun with pumpkins?

This is a cute way to get your kids to eat their fruit. What kid would not want a cute carved orange served with their lunch?

It would also be a great way for kids at school or in clubs to be able to have fun carving something together. It is next to impossible to carve pumpkins in large groups but you sure could carve oranges. In the end you would also have a healthy snack instead of just a pile of candy.

When carving oranges you need to be careful to not cut too deep. You just want to cut the outer orange skin. Toothpicks will help you pull the orange skin away.