As far as I can tell, if you have children you can’t have a tidy house. It’s one or the other and I seem to have opted for the children and messy house scenario.
My two just do not understand the ‘put one away before you get another one out’ rule and move like mini whirlwinds from one toy to the next which doesn’t exactly help my quest for one of those beautiful, tidy homes that I see in the glossy magazines that I religiously buy each month.
So, in my quest for a tidy house, I’ve introduced chore charts for the kids. I’ve only included the super simple jobs at the moment that they already do, but usually only when they’re told at the moment. I’m hoping that this will mean that the jobs will become like second nature to them and I can then start to add in more jobs.
I found a brilliant website where you can download chore charts for free (here) and I’ve printed out a cute Hello Kitty one for Miss Frugal and a Lego Darth Vadar one for Master Frugal:
Every day they have to tick to say they’ve done their jobs and at the end of the week, I will give them some pocket money to save or spend as they want to. How much is a whole other post ( probably before the first pocketmoney day next Saturday lol).
I don’t want them to have too many jobs to do as I think that children should be allowed to be children but I want to give them enough jobs that they understand that they have their own role to play in the running of the house – How do you strike the right balance though?
Answers on a postcard 😉
