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Update: The crash of the token economy.

I'm having trouble writing these days because a lot of the stuff going on in my head right now is stuff I really ought not put out there, so I'm going through last year's posts looking for things to update.  

One thing that started out giving me high hopes was getting the kids to pull their weight around the house a little more via a token economy.  Here are the posts from that experiment:

• Token economy -- in which I describe my monthly system by which the children lose one popsicle stick each day they don't clean their rooms, and at the end of the month are paid for the remaining popsicle sticks
• Token economy (results) -- in which I report how the first month went
• First expansion of the token-for-chores system:   Laundry -- in which now the children have to do their own laundry once a week
• Job number 3:  Cooking for the family (the first week) -- in which the children begin to earn extra popsicle sticks by making dinner
• The token economy: slowing down?  and adding bathrooms --  in which I notice that compliance is falling off just a bit, and in which the children receive a raise in return for adding a daily bathroom reboot to their tasks
• Token economy:  Little-kid edition -- in which I explain how I use stickers, slightly differently, for the four-year-old's jobs

 

I only had one more set of daily tasks that I was going to spring on them, and then -- after that final set of tasks had become a habit -- I was going to transition out of the token system.  To something.  I wasn't sure what.  Something where I didn't have to handle popsicle sticks every day.  I hadn't made that part of the plan yet.  But the rest of it?  It was all going according to what I'd planned so far.

And then we went to Europe for a month, and came back and dived right into schoolwork --- 

and the whole system fell completely to pieces.

I couldn't believe how easily the routine, built up over five months, fell apart in one month.  And the fault  definitely did not lie entirely with the kids.  It was me too -- I didn't follow up on it.  I let it slide.  I forgot to check their rooms for days at a time.  I sporadically removed popsicle sticks.  The kids didn't leave time in their school day to do their jobs.  We rushed off in the morning to do errands without making sure that the bathrooms were done.  And at the end of the month, we counted up sticks and I had to pay them (because I had said I would) even though I knew darn well that they only had those tokens on the technicality of Mom forgot to make sure we did our jobs.

(Meanwhile, the other thing that fell apart was the baby's infant potty training.  I had been taking him to the toilet about once a day since he was only a few weeks old.  I had him -- at eight months -- sitting on the Baby Bjorn potty and urinating on cue.  We were trucking right along.  And then we went to Europe and used disposable diapers for a month and he forgot everything.  Argh.)

Yeah, I've done some second-guessing about that.  I should have brought the potty with us.  I should have made the kids tidy their rooms in the apartments every day.  Then they'd still have the habit.

On the other hand, we had a nice vacation.  So there's that.

+ + + 

So October didn't work in the sense that the kids didn't do jobs they weren't being asked to do every day, and the children's rooms got messy again.  

It wasn't a complete loss.  They still put their laundry into the wash every week, for example, which is an improvement.  And they still do the daily post-lunch cleanup before going off to have Leave Mom Alone Until Two O'Clock time.  And they still can cook dinner, and so once a week or so one of them will make dinner for me.  And of course they knew how to do everything, so all I have to do is tell them to "do your bathroom jobs," for example, and they can do that.

But the doing-it-every-day-without-my-asking was gone.

I eventually took the popsicle sticks out of their rooms, and they are sitting on the cookbook shelf in my kitchen while I try to figure out what I do next.

+ + +

I talked to Mark about it and he suggested that I consider which parts of the kids' jobs are working well.

"Well, the part that goes the absolute best is the after-lunch cleanup," I mused.  "The 8yo and 11yo squabble a lot, and the 8yo does her level best to dawdle so her brothers do more of the work, but on the whole they get it done well and they get it done quickly.  I think it's because we do it at the same time every day that we're home, and because they know that their break lasts until two o'clock no matter how long it takes them.  

"Also, I'm right there while they are cleaning up -- sometimes I'm helping them, sometimes I'm feeding the baby, sometimes I'm using the computer -- and they know I won't let them go until it's done right.   So they're motivated to get it done, so they can run off and have break time.  Usually they're done by 1:15, and that's with us sitting down to lunch around noon, but sometimes if we finish morning school early and then have lunch early, they're done as early as 12:30."

"Well, maybe you need to schedule times in the day to do all the other jobs," said Mark.  

"And maybe I should motivate them by promising that if they finish the jobs early, there will be break time.  With a hard stop at some clock time -- like the two o'clock end of break and start of afternoon school.  If they don't finish by then there won't be any break."

"I don't know if the kids need a break to be motivated," said Mark, "if we're going to have their allowance hang on it."

I thought of the popsicle sticks, now gathering dust on my shelf.  "I don't know if I can keep track well enough to have their allowance hang on it."

"Figure something out, and if you need help keeping track, tell me what I can do to help and I'll do it."

+ + + 

Later I sat down and thought about the jobs I wanted the kids to do and the break times that are part of our day.    I like do the younger kids' school in two bursts, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with a long break in the middle of the day.   (My high schooler has a good deal of freedom in setting his own work/break/sleep schedule, since he doesn't really need my help from day to day.)  

We're already using the 2 p.m. start of school as a "hard stop" on break time.  

There's also the morning start, 9:30 or 10 a.m.... maybe I could use that as the end of a "morning break" that they could get if they finished a set of morning chores.

And then, we have lunchtime.  Maybe I could tell them they had to do a small chore before they could come to the table for lunch.  

And then, we have an afternoon snack at three-thirty or so, a little earlier on Wednesdays because dinner has to be earlier because they have to leave for religious ed.  Maybe I could have them do something before they can have snack...

I made a little schedule and showed it to everyone at dinner time.  There was much groaning.

But my teenage son said, "I can do a better job than that, Mom.  You should let me come up with a system."

At first I was reluctant, but then I said.... "OK.  You come up with something."

More on this next time...

Housekeeping.

Sometimes I think the world must be made up of two kinds of people, or at least two kinds of housekeepers.

(1) The kind of person who says, "Life's too short to spend your free time tidying up"

(2) The kind of person who says "Life's too short to spend your free time looking at a lot of untidy stuff"

I am the latter type of person, and so is my husband, so we're compatible in this way, which is thankful; I expect it's hard for the two types of person to be married to each other, unless they're both also super-patient and aware.  

Not that we can keep up with it, what with the five children who spend their days here:

 

typical, not preferred, morning orientation of the kitchen, before most children are awake

 

mudroom -- yes, I'm fortunate, nay, privileged, to have one -- no, we can never find anything in here

 

Furthermore, evidence suggests that the children's rooms have become clogged enough with extraneous stuff that they need to be snaked out, so to speak, so that the children have an easier time keeping their own spaces clean.  

This weekend happens to be clear, and so the two of us have agreed that This is The Weekend Of The Great Household Purge. Will it be filled with family fun and togetherness?  Togetherness, yes.  Fun?  I'll probably find it satisfying to pull all the accumulated bits from under beds and carry garbage bags of broken toys to the corner.

We'll be setting timers for 20 minutes of work and then 10 minutes of screen time and then 20 minutes of work again.  We'll be exhorting the children to get back to their tasks so they don't have the timers turned back.  I'm going to put some thought into rewards that can be "unlocked," video-game style, if they accomplish certain outcome-based milestones.  Fill 1 large box with your own belongings for Goodwill and you get a prize.  Accomplish complete processing of your own clothes -- all clean things put away, all remaining dirty things confined to a single basket, all out-of-season things upstairs waiting for me to put them in storage -- get another prize.  Remove all the stray items from the basement climbing gym and put them back in their own places:  everyone gets a prize.  

(Not sure what the prizes will be; not toys, which defeats the purpose; probably something like "we order pizza for lunch on the next school day" or "we put a family trip to the science museum on the calendar instead of vaguely promising to go some time" or "we rent a movie and watch it all together in the evening.")

We might top it all off with Family Game Night, which is what I call it when, once a year or so, we open up all the boxes, and count the game pieces, and take all the pieces out of the wrong boxes, and get rid of the games that have been rendered unplayable by attrition, and order extra dice on Amazon.com, and seal all the little bits into Ziploc bags inside the correct boxes.  

+ + +

We clean a lot.  We make the kids clean a lot.  I probably make the kids clean the main living area four times a day:

•  swap the dishwasher after breakfast and wipe off the table
• swap the dishwasher after lunch and wipe off the counters and pick up the floor (then they get to have break time until two o'clock)
• pick up the floor and clear their school desks around 4:30 for "end of the day cleanup"
• help clean up the dinner dishes between dinner and bedtime snack.

They're also supposed to keep their rooms clean (which has not happened consistently since we got back from Europe, part of the reason for the upcoming Great Purge) and do a daily bathroom-tidying task without being asked.  This does not happen consistently either, these days; I have laid out the consequences of demonstrating that they are not able to do all the tasks, which are that I will take jobs away from them and reduce their allowance accordingly at the start of December.  We'll see.

+ + +

Sometimes I imagine my children talking to their future therapists, or maybe friends over coffee, and they'll be saying:  

My mom was this total neat freak.  

She made us clean the house four times a day.  

We were homeschooled, so there was plenty of time to put us to work.  

I think she spent more time making us clean the house than she spent teaching us.

+ + +

And in my fantasy I can appear in the fantasy therapist's office and retort, "Well, you ate four times a day.  Five, actually.  And since you were homeschooled, you were home all day living in the house, so yes, actually, there was plenty of time for you to make it messy again after you cleaned it.  And a big part of what I taught you, besides how to read and reason and calculate and remember, is how to maintain a home so that you can find what you need when you need it.  How to care for your clothing.   How to keep a bathroom sanitary.  How to feed yourself and how to feed a family."

+ + +

So, you know, one thing we don't do very much is sit around in the evenings with the children and just enjoy each other's company.  

Instead, they flee after dinner, hoping that we won't call them back to swap the dishwasher.  And it works sometimes, because sometimes Mark and I will open another beer and sit there together, amongst the dinner dishes and pans, marveling at the abundance around us and in one another, and talk together as husband and wife; sometimes it's quite a while before we say, "Goodness, we've got to get this place straightened up and put the kids to bed," and the kids know it, and they stay upstairs and play Minecraft or Settlers of Catan or whatever and stay out of our way until we make them come down and empty the dishwasher.

And it's just how we roll.  In my mind I imagine other people, who own sofas more comfortable than mine,  games and books and kitchenware bursting out of their cupboards and corners piled high with clean but not-yet-folded laundry, happily putting off the dishes till tomorrow, snuggling on the sofa and reading a stack of beautiful library books to their children while other children are busy building complicated craft projects in the next room, getting glitter on things and leaving pompoms and pipe cleaners stuck to the floor.  

It's a romantic picture, and it isn't the picture I live in.  I hasten to add that if it is the picture you live in, I really do love coming over to your house for a visit.  My children will disappear into the recesses of your home, and I will cup the mug of hot coffee you pour me between my two hands and sink into the sofa and sigh with contentment and welcome, knowing that none of your cupboards are my business, although if you start folding towels in front of me, I'll also be glad to help.

But you know, we really all are different, and regardless of what kind of therapy they may or may not need -- someday my kids get to decide what satisfies them, and live in their own space...

....aha, though, probably among other human beings who have their own desires.

But together with others they will get to work out what they view will be when they come down the stairs in the morning; and what to do with what's left of the light in the evenings...

just like we do, those winter evenings when the snow is coming down outside, and I could wash these glasses right now, or else, if you want, I could fill them again.

The token economy: slowing down? And, adding bathrooms.

It's the end of another month, and I thought I'd check in about the token economy.

Starting in April I wrote a few posts about using a "token economy" to link my kids' allowance to certain housekeeping chores.   

• Introduction, including the story of waffling about what to do with allowance
• Results of my first experiment, linking room-cleaning to allowance, using popsicle sticks as daily tokens
• Expanding the system to include laundry
• Cooking for the family for "bonus tokens" 

Things fell off a bit this month because of some travel:  all of us out of town for a week, various children gone with grandparents and for scout camp; I was even out of town for a bit.  It was hard for me to remember to check rooms, and sometimes there weren't any children there to check.  They'll get more money than they deserve this time!  

I did settle on one procedure:  If you go to camp for a week, and you put your room in order before you go, you'll get to keep your token for every day that week (even if a sibling messes up your room while you're gone, or if Mom cleans the house and tosses all the belongings she finds in through your room door).  If you don't tidy before you go, you'll lose the token for every day that week.  

The schedule has been so weird that only two family dinners have been made by kids this month.  But we should get back to that in August, most of which we'll be home for.

+ + +

August's new chore will be daily bathroom maintenance.  

Our house has two and a half baths.  One full bath is part of the master suite, and the kids aren't supposed to use it unless the other two are occupied, so we won't have them clean it either.  The other two are a tiny main-floor powder room and an upstairs bathroom/laundry room combination.

Three kids, two bathrooms, what to do?  I want to keep it simple:  both bathrooms presentable enough for guests every day, and have it be really clear whose job is whose.  The idea is that the bathroom task and the bedroom task must be done for each child to avoid losing his day's token.  Because it's all-or-nothing, the tasks must be simple, a daily minimum that will keep the room from getting out of control.  

But, at the same time, I'm going to give them a fifty percent raise:  each of the 30 tokens will now be worth 75¢, but it'll be easier to lose.  (Making dinner for the family will earn an extra "bonus" dollar for the day).  So each child could get up to $26.50 in the month, if they made dinner once a week and never missed a chore.

+ + +

I decided to assign my 13yo -- who will turn 14 soon -- sole responsibility for the powder room, which of course is what guests see most often.  It's to be cleaned up last thing before going upstairs to bed at night, and will be checked in the morning.  Every night he'll have to confirm that

• trash is not full
• there is TP on the roll and there is a spare roll
• there is nothing on the floor
• there is nothing on the counter, except the soap dispenser
• sink is wiped, mirror is wiped, toilet is wiped, light switch and doorknob are not messy
• there is a hand towel ready to be used.

My 7yo, who is to turn eight next week, will share responsibility for the kids' full bath/laundry room with her 10yo brother.  I don't want a complicated alternating-days schedule; instead we'll have a clear division of tasks.  The 7yo's job, which has to happen after she has brushed her teeth and bathed, will be to ensure:

• all bath toys are in the basket
• there are no other toys
• there is no laundry on the floor (if she finds her big brothers' dirty socks and such, she gets to fling them into the boys' room for them to deal with as part of their room-cleaning tasks)
• the towels, bathing suits, gym bags, etc. are hung up, not on the floor
• the shower curtain is pulled closed

The 10yo's job, which has to happen after the 7yo is done, will be to check that 

• trash is not full
• no detergent is spilled on the floor
• there is TP on the roll and there is a spare roll
• the sink is wiped, the mirror is wiped, the toilet is wiped
• the toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap are neatly arranged
• nothing else is on the sink
• there is a hand towel ready to be used 
• there is a clean bath mat neatly placed on the floor

 

I bought two big bottles of Windex All-Surface cleaner, which is supposed to be good for both glass and countertops, and stowed one in each of the two bathrooms.  The kids know where cleaning rags are to be found.  I'll put up a checklist in each bathroom.

+ + +

"Where are you going with this?" Mark wanted to know yesterday when I sought his opinion on how much to raise the values of the tokens.  "Are we going to be doing tokens forever, or is this just a learning tool?"

I don't actually know yet.  Mainly, I needed to cut down on my daily workload and set clear expectations.  Perhaps we can toss the tokens later; I hope so.  Or perhaps we can keep them just for the younger children and the older children can "graduate" to a less rigid system.  I'm not sure.  But for now, it really is working; and there are still tasks left to add.  I've noticed since we got a new computer and put the old one in the upstairs office, the upstairs office keeps accumulating piles of pillows and blankets and extra chairs and odd pieces of paper with notes about upcoming Minecraft buildings on it.  And there's the game room, where the Wii and all the board games are:  constantly cluttered.  And the basement climbing gym is constantly acquiring new socks and hoodies on the floor...

What I think this is doing for me is serving as a way to communicate my expectations.   Instead of fuming about a problem, or worse, resignedly fixing it myself, I want to be able to delegate without nagging.   I want kids to be in the habit of looking at a room and seeing if something needs to be done, and not assuming that some other person will make the problem disappear.  Picking up after themselves.  

And -- hey -- I want to live in a tidier house without having to be the one to do all the tidying.  I -- quite literally -- have enough other things to do.

Packing lightly.

While Mark is tasked with assembling most of the gear for our family's upcoming European trip -- we'll be going to the mountains, so "gear" includes, e.g., things that clank when you walk -- I am tasked with assembling wardrobes, at least for the smaller children and myself.

Because of the large amount of gear, it almost seems like a fool's errand to attempt to pack "light," but I figured that the exercise would be good for us anyway. Ever since I had the first chance to remake my closet during the Year of Four Wardrobes (tl;dr: significant weight loss followed by my fourth pregnancy) I've been playing around with paring things down to a small collection of pieces I like and wear, pieces that all go together in a variety of ways so that each has its role: a designed collection. There are numerous advantages of having such a design in mind: you buy fewer garments and accessories overall, wear the things you buy more frequently, have a less cluttered closet, and make it easier to quickly grab an outfit that works by thinning out the clutter of things you don't really ever wear.

On a side note, while I was posting about this on FB, ChristyP suggested the Project333 website. This is another minimalist-wardrobe blog, with a twist and a challenge - the idea is to pare down to thirty-three items for each three months of the year. You rotate different collections of thirty-three as the seasons change (and, of course, replace items as they wear out or become less useful). I rather liked this concept, as the rotation keeps it fresh, and weather extremes aren't much of an issue. The whole thing appeals to me a lot; I like planning, I enjoy shopping for clothes when I have a purpose in mind, and I hate clutter.

The author has some other articles here and there pertaining to the be-free-of-your-excess-clutter philosophy. Fortunately, I never developed an obsession with cosmetics, so I am ahead in the minimalist lifestyle there; I almost never wore them when I was younger and now, as I have occasionally wanted to look a bit more put together, I took time to curate a targeted kit (exactly one mascara, exactly one foundation, exactly one lip color, 4 brushes, etc.)

I cannot really brag about my minimalist makeup drawer, however. First of all, I am not inclined to wear much anyway, so buying too many lipsticks is just not a temptation I experience. More importantly, whatever simplifying cred I may have earned by not having much of that I make up for in spades with my recurring belief that all my problems will be solved if I just buy one more bag. But the wardrobe-simplifying, facilitated by a few size-changes necessitating several do-overs, has been going well.

Going on a trip is an opportunity to pare down even further. It wasn't till I started trip-planning that I learned the name for the entire concept: "capsule wardrobe." Here is a sample article from TravelFashionGirl, a website that I enjoyed perusing as I started thinking about putting together a travel capsule wardrobe for my upcoming 28-day trip.

My first draft looked like this:

It includes the following 15 pieces, not counting pajamas and underwear and socks and hiking boots and the like:

• Black trousers
• Black leggings
• Red-orange performancewear skort
• Black tank (nursing openings)
• Black tee (nursing openings)
• Black short sleeve empire waist top (nursing openings)
• White tank
• White "button-down" style shirt, 3/4 sleeves, lightweight
• Hot pink scoop-neck tee
• Lightweight black long-sleeve cardigan/wrap (rolls up really small)
• Denim shirt
• Red-orange cardigan
• Black tank dress (no nursing openings, but stretchy enough I can pull down the neck)
• Sleeveless shirtwaist-type dress with hot pink/red-orange/white pattern
• Red-orange scarf

Shoes that go with this:

• Black sandals
• Black ankle boots

I'm really pleased with how this turned out. It only needs a couple of extra things, in fact, to be a complete non-travel capsule wardrobe for late summer/autumn -- mostly things I already have, like bootleg jeans and a few more long-sleeve tees.

Some of the combinations:

 

 

But I need to swap a few things out for my trip, because I think that once I add the fleece, hiking pants, rain gear, and base layers that I need for the mountains, the overall wardrobe will be unnecessarily heavy on warm items. I will probably drop the denim shirt and add another tee and a pair of lightweight capris. This will bring the total up to 18-20 items, which is not bad considering it is for two seasons, requires enough warm layers for an emergency overnight in the mountains, and has to last 28 days.

+ + +

I also made a capsule wardrobe for my daughter, which was fun since I had to get her late summer/autumn clothes anyway. I made her neutral color be navy and her accent color be turquoise, since she has a little purse and a pair of Keen sandals that color, and I got almost everything from Old Navy on one of their big sale weekends. Add a pair of navy espadrilles, some fleece and hiking pants, and she is set for the city and the mountains. I think I am going to keep up the capsule approach as she gets bigger.

 

 

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Cooperating, not competing, priorities.

That put-on-your-swimsuit-for-your-kids'-sake post that I wrote about has spread its influence throughout the feminine half of the blogosphere, at least the sector* populated by mothering mothers. Elizabeth Duffy, writing at Patheos, had a good post the other day:

One of the swim coaches stood on the side of the pool in a handsome black tank, and she was as plump and dimply as the rest of us, but she stood up straight, shoulders back, making bold demonstrations of each stroke for her pupils. I remember thinking that her confidence paired with an obvious tendency not to take herself too seriously was very appealing, and not just to the eyes.

She was not slouching out of sight, and it wasn’t just because she found the right suit for her body type, or because she had memories to make. She had a job to do, an important one, and she clearly found her work fulfilling enough that she could be at peace with herself and delight in her body’s ability to do its job well.

This is really the way that I prefer to think about it; indeed, though getting in the water and splashing with your kids is important, this it's the reason behind that reason. We're raising kids, and so everything we do teaches them how to be. If we want to teach them what their bodies are good for -- doing and being, as part of their human wholeness; not just appearing and seeming, and certainly not merely things to be used and abused; well, being ashamed of the appearance of our own is only going to teach the wrong lessons.

Too, being focused on the jobs you have to do and the joys you want to have is better than being hyperfocused on What People Will Think When They See Me.

More from Elizabeth:

The irony is, that when a woman of a certain body type or a certain age decides to get thin–I count myself here–you really do end up giving everything else up as your mental energy goes into counting calories, planning meals, and incorporating strategies to prevent yourself from eating. There are many hours spent in the gym, many hours spent working on self-image rather doing things of interest to yourself or of import to other people.

Not every woman who decides to get fit loses their perspective this way, but I certainly have, and I have corroborated my experiences with female friends. When I decide to be thin, I become a very boring person, a stressed out person, someone who only thinks about food and mentally scourges herself for mistakes made when eating.

You don’t usually get to have it both ways–you don’t get to be a skinny woman, and at the same time, a woman who’s happy to sit at a bar and drink pints with her husband. You don’t get to be someone who is fully invested in being thin, and at the same time finds herself interesting enough in her own right to forget occasionally her body and its tendency to grow fat when it’s having fun.

I can also corroborate this. The year that I achieved my big weight loss was a year of absolute concentration and obsession. It consumed almost all my attention. I don't regret it, and I have found the effort to be fruitful in more ways than one -- it was an achievement I had never thought possible, and it opened up all sorts of possibilities for me as well as leading to a lot of reflection on my identity. But it was so costly. Also, I was a very boring person for a whole year except to other people who were trying to lose weight. I feel a little bad for having sucked other people into my vortex of gluttony-shaming.

But I wasn't bored.

I wasn't bored because, to put it bluntly, I am a geek, and I can really get into that which bores other people. Whatever my project, I must love it and dig deeply into it, understand it and analyze it, take it apart and put it together in different ways. This is how I cook, how I gestate and give birth and care for babies, how I educate my kids, how I approach faith. My life is a little laboratory, and it's okay if the results are not repeatable by others because they're highly tailored to my own surroundings. The year that I lost all that damn extra weight and learned to be an athlete was the first year that my own body became the laboratory for the sake of itself.

(And I do call it "becoming an athlete" for a reason. I won't call it just "fitness," it was more than that, an identity crisis was involved. I wanted not just to appear thin, but to feel like Elizabeth's swim instructor, strong and capable.)

So I wasn't bored. And if my spouse was bored, he did a good job of hiding it. We sat at the bar and drank pints together -- only we split them, and he drank more deeply than I did, for that year.

We still share pints that way. And that's emblematic of the difference.

Some friends speculated that it was possible for me to temporarily prioritize becoming an athlete in a way that it might not have been for me today, had I put it off. I was six years younger, I had only three children. And maybe that's so.

But staying an athlete, even an amateur one only competitive against herself, is a priority -- not in competition with the priorities of raising my family and accompanying my husband, but in union with them.

I am married to a person who aspires to be always training for the next goal. His sports are downhill skiing and climbing (both rock and ice); seeing as how we live in the northern plains instead of the western mountains, he's never going to be able to find the time to do either of them frequently enough to excel at either, but he can always be training for his next trip so he can have more options and have more fun. And so he tries to get to the gym three times a week if he can. And so it's something we do together -- not so much the climbing (I have an old wrist injury) but the training. Neither of us has the time to train very well or thoroughly, but it's something we can talk about over those single shared pints.

And since he's a geek too, and also since training involves chemistry and physics that neither of us has ever mastered, we can talk about it over and over and over again. That's a lot of pints.

Athleticism of a certain individualistic type is a family value for us. (It runs in Mark's family of origin; his siblings and their spouses have been runners, mountain-bike and road-cycling racers, equestrians, and collegiate-level wrestlers, along with the occasional dabbling in climbing and downhill skiing.) We are working to pass it on to our kids. That priority meshes with our other family and marriage priorities, so it isn't in competition with them (although it has to be balanced with them: I have to teach and feed the children, and Mark has to go to work). I think this more than anything else is why the changes I made six years ago have remained permanent. They reinforce, and are reinforced by, the other good things I have in my life and want to keep.

_______

*Yeah, I couldn't stop myself from googling just to double check that "sector" was the correct geometrical term with respect to a piece of a sphere, as I knew it was for a circle. Although it isn't quite as satisfying because the arcs that define the sectors of a circle, being one-dimensional, perfectly tessellate the "surface" (i.e., the circumference) of the circle -- cf. pie charts -- but the domed spherical sectors by necessity have gaps between. Unless, of course, there are an infinite number of them in just the right distribution of volumes, much as you can fill a rectangular box perfectly with an infinite assortment of differently-sized spheres.**

 

**Yeah, I finished writing the footnote before I went on to write the rest of this post.

 

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Ramping up and focusing on what's mine.

Now that May has rolled around again, I am already turning my thoughts toward the next school year.  

To be honest, I've kind of given up on this one.  

After the baby was born at Christmastime, and then H.'s twins in February, and then some drastic changes in plans for our friends in the other family we co-school with --

it became pretty clear that we were not going to finish out the year as planned.

This happens a lot in home schools, when babies are born.

So instead we have turned to a sort of schooling that I think of as "rehearsal for next year."    The big changes have already come.  Now we can try to get used to them, and work around them.

+ + +

Those pictures up above are my new schoolroom layout.  I think I've finally found the best desk arrangement for the space.  I don't know why it took me so long to come up with it, other than I have been stuck inside the "rectangle" box.  

• The extra space it creates in the corner by the windows gives me enough room to put a bassinet (or later, a playpen type thing, maybe).  
• Students sitting in three of the desks can see the dry-erase board, and all four of them can see the windows, which I sometimes use as a dry-erase surface.  
• The easy chair can be turned to face the desks, so a nursing mom can sit while teaching.
• My seven- and ten-year-olds can be seated out of arms' reach of one another.

+ + +

H. and I have been getting together to teach for a little while, once or twice a week, only for half days.  I re-started teaching geometry first, a double lesson once a week; then H. began working on English literature again.   That's kind of our limit for now; Latin is on hiatus.  We'll return to a simplified, but complete, schedule in the fall for our oldests' ninth grade year.

Yesterday was the first time H. came to my house since the twins were born.  I cleaned up an old bassinet for the occasion, the one I kept in my office when I had my first baby while I was in grad school.  H. brought a portable one and added that to another portable one that I had set up in the living room.

(Action shot:  nursing singleton in the foreground, diaper changing twins in the background.)

H. arrived around eleven; we had a cup of coffee together; I taught geometry for 45 minutes; lunch (turkey sandwiches) was served by our daughters; then I worked on next year's curricula while H. taught language arts, and then we had tea.  

The weather turned poor, so H. stayed to share in our pizza dinner while waiting out the storm.  A good day.  I think we're going to be able to make it work pretty well, and believe me, ramping back up slowly is a big part of that.

+ + +

My house is beautifully clean, as clean as it gets, because the housecleaner just left.  I've decided that Every Three Weeks is the right frequency to get a deep cleaning, and the best way for it to happen is to hire someone else to do it.

 We all still have to work the night before to clear the floors and counters, make room in the laundry and so forth, so that we really get our money's worth.  But do the math:  it takes the housecleaner about four hours to vacuum, dust, scrub, and mop the house from top to bottom.

Meanwhile, I teach a half day of school.  

I resisted hiring outside help for a long time.    I finally started hiring cleaners after my now-four-year-old became a toddler.   It took me a while to get used to having some other person come into my home and clean my stuff, but now I'm sold on it.  The woman who comes in to clean now is the second regular housecleaner we have hired; the first was a young man who was wonderfully cheap -- that's what finally convinced me to give outside help a try -- but in the end could not keep his business afloat.  I pay more now, but since she really does a better job, I don't mind.

I know plenty of homeschoolers prefer to save their money and put their kids to work instead.  I think this is largely a matter of choice. Yes, it's important to teach kids to care for a home, and so technically we could spend a half day or a full day on cleaning projects every month and it would still have educational value.  Yes, it's money that could be spent on other things.  I get that. 

But specialization is not a bad thing.  We have the money, and I think it does good work when I spend it this way; it stays in our local economy, after all, and helps support another family.  She's faster than I would be, and definitely more thorough; while she was here, I was supervising math and oil painting.   And (unlike when the kids help me clean) I didn't feel the need to yell at anyone, so the money bought me a measure of emotional peace as well.  

I've definitely figured out that next year, my duties have to be streamlined if I want to do them well.  

+ + +

H. is making some similar changes, at least temporarily while the twins are small.  She laughs about how everything comes on a truck now:  clean cloth diapers arrive (and dirty ones leave); groceries come in a truck; clothes for the children, school supplies, everything.  Errand-running had to be trimmed back to the absolute minimum, hence, no shopping in physical stores anymore.  

Focus will be the watchword for next year.  Both of us need to focus our energies.  She, because she finds herself in such a rare and intense kind of parenting; me, because I'm always tempted to sprawl them all out onto everything except one-on-one connection with my children, and I sense that with the birth of my fifth child I have tipped past the point of being able to pretend I have a handle on everything and everyone.

I can outsource the housecleaning.  I can outsource some of the teaching.  I can't outsource being wife and mother.  I have always known this, but it's finally sinking in.

First expansion of the token-for-chores system: Laundry.

A couple of months ago I described my plan to use a token economy pour encourager les enfants to keep their rooms cleaner than they had been.  I reported some preliminary results in a subsequent post.

Now the second month is drawing to a close.  Tomorrow I will count up the children's remaining tokens and issue allowance.  But I'm too curious to wait!  So I'm going to run upstairs right now and see how they did.

[insert sound of me pounding up the stairs, a pause, and then the sound of my footsteps returning to the computer]

Of the 30 tokens I put into their jars at the start of the month, assuming they keep their rooms clean tomorrow and don't lose one more:

• My thirteen-year-old son has 28, and will receive $14 in allowance
• My ten-year-old son has 21, and will receive $10.50
• My seven-year-old daughter has 17, and will receive $8.50

Meanwhile, even though they didn't all meet the standards I set every day --

-- and a reminder, the standards were "floor clean, covers pulled up, closet door shut" --

every room was cleaner every day than it typically was before starting the system.  Before, we had periodic marathon room-cleaning sessions, one day before the paid housecleaner showed up for the monthly vacuuming.  

So from my point of view, this system is a spectacular success.  I am doing almost zero nagging.  Once each day, I pop into their rooms for a check.  If I forget, they get to keep a token (so I'm not actually obligated to check).  

+ + +

Only once did I use the promise of a token for something extra.  One day I needed the kitchen cleaned up really fast, so I challenged my two big boys to speed through it in under fifteen minutes and without complaining, with a promise of one previously-lost token returned to each of them if they could do it.

They did.

There's no way they would have done it if I'd said, "I'll pay you fifty cents."

The psychology of gains and losses is very interesting.

+ + +

My teenage boy still hates the system.  He explained to me this morning that it makes him feel sad and angry every single day to see his jar of tokens on his shelf.  He asked again if he couldn't start from zero and gain tokens, rather than starting from thirty and lose tokens.  "It feels like a punishment," he said, "instead of a payment."

"I do pay you," I said, "at the end of the month, almost just like a paycheck works.  Think of the tokens as an easy way for me to keep track of what you are going to be paid for the work you do."  But he said the tokens were the same as money as far as he was concerned, and when I remove one it is like having his money taken away.

I acknowledged that this system is probably not the best system to fit with his particular personality, but that I was going to keep it going for now because it was working pretty well for the family as a whole.  "It isn't perfect," I said.  "It will evolve and adjust as we all learn what works and what doesn't.  I will make changes to it.  But I am going to make the changes slowly.  This is a long-term project."

+ + +

On Thursday we begin a new month, and the children will receive a refreshed jar of thirty tokens.  They will also become responsible for their own laundry.

Now, Mark and I see eye-to-eye on most of the important issues that face today's married couples, but one of them is not "How To Tell If The Laundry Is Caught Up."   Therefore, I broached the subject with some trepidation, which turned out to be well-founded.  

(I think the laundry is caught up if no baskets are actually overflowing with dirty laundry yet.  Mark will tell me if I have gotten this wrong, but my current understanding is that he thinks it is caught up if there is less than a full load of dirty laundry total in the entire house AND all the clean laundry is put away.)

About thirty minutes later, we were ready to discuss the new laundry system for kids.  My teenage son also participated, strenuously insisting that it would be inappropriate to treat him exactly like his younger siblings, since he is already in the habit of putting clothes in the wash when he's about to run out.  After some discussion, we decided that he was correct, and modified the system accordingly.

We made our plan based on the answer to the question, "What problems do I want this system to solve?"  

+ + + 

Number one, I don't want to hear, "But I don't have any clean clothes!"  On Sunday morning, I want there to be clean clothes for church.  If there's a Scout or AHG meeting, I want each child to have a clean uniform.  If it's swimming lesson day, their towels and suits should be ready to go.  No one should run out of clean pants and shirts.

Number two, I don't want clean clothes to accumulate in the laundry room.  We have room on the shelves and counter for about five baskets full of clean clothes.  Occasionally we will stack towers of clean baskets, but I don't like that because the dirty bottoms of the baskets sit on clean clothes.  Also, we risk losing items that fall behind the washer and dryer.  So five baskets is really the capacity.

That's basically it.  I don't have high standards.  I just want the kids to make sure they don't run out of clothes, and I want them to keep moving items OUT of the laundry room as they move their clothes IN.

+ + +

Today, two days before the month starts, we had a dry run.  I distributed to each child two brand-new square black laundry baskets, labeled with names.  And I pointed them to a brand-new sign posted in the laundry room, headed "Kids' Laundry Responsibilities."

It said:

 

Your clothes (uniforms, church outfits, etc.) clean when you need them (3 tokens)

 

You may have 1 black basket of your clothes in this room at a time (1 token)

 

In other words:  If ever they don't have the clothes that they need clean when they need them, they'll lose three of their tokens.   And, if ever I find more than one basketful of a particular child's clothes in the laundry room, he'll lose one token.

There's more to this.  Such as, when must laundry be done?

I am allowing my oldest to decide when he needs to put his laundry in; but the younger two, I expect I'll have to micromanage just a bit more to start with.  So for now, my daughter is required to wash her dirty clothes on Tuesday mornings, and my second son is required to wash his dirty clothes on Wednesday mornings.  Each of them pays a penalty of one token per day that the weekly load is delayed.  

Once those younger kids are in the weekly laundry habit, I hope to lift the specific-day requirement.

+ + +

It seems a bit too fussy for our family to insist that each person wash his own clothes, dry his own clothes, and then remove his own clothes from the laundry room and put them away.  We have one washer and one dryer, conveniently located on the same level with the bedrooms, and laundry is a continuous operation.  So instead, the ideal we've always had in mind is "one load in, one load out."

Whoever wants to put a load into the washer mus first:  

• make room for a new basket on the shelves by delivering at least one basket of clothes to the correct part of the house
• move dry clothes from the dryer to a basket on the shelves
• move wet clothes from the washer to the dryer, and start the dryer

In this way, we are all helping each other get the laundry done.  But everyone has the responsibility of putting his own clothes into the system (and dealing with the basket of clean, dry clothes that he might find awaiting him on his bed at the end of the day).

Now I just have to confer with my husband about whether to raise the value of a token along with the increased responsibility.  I'm inclined not to raise it until I find out how well they take on their new jobs.

Pivoting.

Once I heard a very, very good piece of homeschooling advice, perfectly tailored to my besetting character flaw of Stick-To-The-Schedulism.  You know, the kind of thing that makes me inordinately upset about unexpected changes of plan.

It was this:

When the s#!t hits the fan,

or something entirely unexpected (good or bad) falls into your lap,

and your entire day is knocked off kilter,

and you're unhappily surveying the list of Stuff I Was Supposed To Do Today,

at the same time that you are looking at the clock and wondering how on earth you will catch up,

particularly if, against all reason, you are tempted to try to cram the whole day's work into the remaining hours...

... that is the time to pivot to a new mission for the rest of the day:

The remaining hours of this day will be spent putting tomorrow in order,

so that tomorrow will be the best it can possibly be.

 

Look at  it this way.  The few hours you have left in this "ruined" day must be spent one way or another.  You can take them as "extra time for tomorrow" or you can take them as "remnants of today."  Extra time for tomorrow is much more fun, more relaxing, and probably more valuable in the long run, at least for me. 

Sometimes, when I've written off Today in favor of a head start on Tomorrow, we clean the schoolroom.  Sometimes I catch up on records.  Sometimes I make a meal plan or precook tomorrow's dinner.  Sometimes I do long term planning.  Sometimes I read to the kids or cue up a good movie.  The next morning always feels like a fresh start, and usually it really is a good day.

+ + +

I bring this up because recent turns of events have led me to apply this same principle to the entire third quarter of our school year.   Maybe the fourth quarter too, it's hard to tell.

Our baby was born Christmas week, just before the start of what I would call the third quarter, and three weeks earlier than expected.   Then just as we were starting up again, H., my partner in co-schooling, pregnant with twins, had to go on bed rest.  She delivered the twins five weeks early, around what would have been week 21 of my school year.

 A month later, of course, we are still nowhere near starting up our "together" subjects again.   My oldest hasn't quite stopped completely; he's working his way through Robinson Crusoe on assignment from H., and he's keeping up with history, but Latin and Geometry have been indefinitely suspended.  H.'s twins (one beautiful girl and one beautiful boy) are doing pretty well, but feeding them is a round-the-clock job for her right now and for who knows how long?  

So it's make-the-best-of-it territory.

•  I have been experimenting with an unschooling approach on the two free days, while I take the extra time to work on next year's curriculum and organize thoughts for the overall high school program.  
• We are using some of the time to polish up our Italian and French for our planned trip in the fall.  
• In a similar vein, we're working through a DVD lecture series on Greek and Roman engineering which we bought last month ($250 would have been steep, but it's been completely worth the $70 or so that we paid to get it on sale.)
• My seven-year-old has rediscovered our favorite chess-learning program.  And she's decided to work towards a sports pin (Bowling) for AHG, so we've checked some books out of the library so she can learn the scoring system.  (Now she wants her own bowling ball, which might not actually be a bad idea since there are never any 6-lb house balls at the local lanes and I have two smaller children coming up behind her.)
• My thirteen-year-old has been building computer circuits out of redstone in Minecraft, which must set some kind of record for meta.
• I've had some time to sit down with my four-year-old and start working on letter-sound correspondence.
• And we're working on handwriting again using a new-to-me program that everyone is much happier with, especially me, because the exemplar font is not unlike the way I really write when I'm writing neatly but comfortably -- a sort of joined-italic-printscript.  (I've had it with handwriting programs that don't have as their primary goals speedy and legible writing.)  One thing that made this program, BFH, good for our family is that you can purchase a "handwriting intervention" program (Fix It Write) for older students.  So my thirteen-year-old is using that, while the younger kids are doing beginners' sheets.
• Finally, I'm still working on my new time management resolutions (see previous posts starting here).

And you know, I think it's going all right.  The truth is, with a new baby myself, I'm not really feeling all that energetic right now.  I'm physically well, but I'm out of shape and tired, and having decided to take it a bit easy is turning out to feel like a better and better idea as the weeks go by and it gets more and more impossible to "catch up."

At some point, we'll just have to declare it Starting Over time.

+ + +

I have a feeling that when H. and I come back together again, we're going to be putting together something entirely new, based on our new needs.

But we've done that before, and it worked out beyond our wildest dreams.   So I'm pretty sure that starting over again will work just fine.

 

Task-switching (with bread machine recipes).

I've been keeping up with my practice of making shorter to-do lists on index cards very well.

 (Recall that I do have a master to-do list of ALL THE THINGS!!!! out of sight on my Wunderlist account.  So I'm not losing track of those things that don't make the cut today, but still need to be done sometime.  And I have a calendar, of course.)

So, today I made my little index card list, and it had eight items on it:

• Review evolutionary biology textbook for next year
• Check if high school Excel tutorial matches version on laptop
• Blog post
• See if we can use new geometry curriculum
• Help 7-yo with her AHG sports pin
• Grade papers on counter
• Put laundry away
• Clean out a shelf of china cabinet [so we can get rid of the cabinet when it's empty]

Later I thought of one more thing I wanted to put on my list, and as luck would have it, there was one line remaining on the index card, so I added it below:

• Print science quizzes for next module

So far so good.  Nine items on my list, including some for school, some for housework, some for personal creative outlet.   By lunchtime I had crossed a few of them off.

• ✓Review evolutionary biology textbook for next year
•   Check if high school Excel tutorial matches version on laptop
•   Blog post
•   See if we can use new geometry curriculum
• ✓Help 7-yo with her AHG sports pin
•   Grade papers on counter
• ✓Put laundry away
• ✓Clean out a shelf of china cabinet [so we can get rid of the cabinet when it's empty]

Then I got on Facebook and was reading a discussion about bread recipes.  It started in a post by  Melanie about bread machines, how she doesn't have one but relies on her stand mixer, and how I don't ever bake bread except using my bread machine.  Melanie posted her sandwich loaf recipe yesterday (scroll down to the second recipe), and I adapted it for the bread machine last night and tried the loaf this morning, and it was really good.  

That got me thinking it was time to update the chart of bread recipes that has been hanging on my fridge for a while, and that has accumulated Post-it notes and wedged-in index cards with new recipes, as well as layers of added notes scribbled on since I hung up the chart.

So I sat down at the computer and made a nice new chart, and printed it up and hung it on the fridge.

Lovely isn't it?  Ingredients down the left (in order of addition to the pan), recipes across the top, measurements in the grid.  Those are the eight recipes we make most often.  The bottom row has added instructions, such as which cycle to use.

Only of course this project was not something that had been on my index card.  So I had to sacrifice some other task from the card.  Out with grading papers:

• ✓Review evolutionary biology textbook for next year
•   Check if high school Excel tutorial matches version on laptop
•   Blog post
•   See if we can use new geometry curriculum
• ✓Help 7-yo with her AHG sports pin
• ✓  Grade papers on counter  Bread machine spreadsheet
• ✓Put laundry away
• ✓Clean out a shelf of china cabinet [so we can get rid of the cabinet when it's empty]

I guess I'll grade the papers another day, or maybe on the weekend.  The lesson here:  when you add one thing, something else has to give.

And hey!  I can now check off "Blog post."

P.S.   Download Bread machine spreadsheet

You're welcome!

 NOTE:  The file was updated a few hours after posting to correct the pizza dough recipe:  2 cups each of whole wheat and bread flour.

New baby's resolution five: Quit multitasking.

I have been writing about a few resolutions I'm making in the wake of bringing a new baby out into the world and into our lives. (The series starts here).

 + + +

I decided I have about six categories of things that I do during a typical day:

• rest
• self-care
• meals
• learning time
• activities
• work (which itself can be subdivided -- more on that later)

I have a vague idea of about how much time I have available to do each of these things, but I am resolved to keep that idea vague and flexible from day to day.

 The main point is that it's finite and not all that much; so I shouldn't get bogged down in endless, super-long to-do lists that get carried over because they are never finished.  

It's okay to keep a master to-do list with ALL THE THINGS on it, and consult that while making the day's list.  Right now I'm trying out an app called Wunderlist, and I'm using it for the ALL THE THINGS list.   But I'm copying a few things from that list onto an index card each morning.

+ + +

I also had some all-the-time goals:  for example, one goal is to demonstrate to my children, interest in the things they had to say to me, and delight in each one as a person.  I feel these things far more often than I make them known, and I wanted to work on communicating that love, interest, and delight all day long through all the things I do.

But I've found that a major obstacle to that is constant multitasking.  I'm always trying to do two things at once.    If I'm resting, I'm answering email on my iPad.  If I'm running a spelling lesson, I'm tidying my countertop while I wait for kids to write down each word.  While I'm chopping onions, I'm supervising my seven-year-old's math homework.  While I'm lecturing my son about the boots that I keep tripping over in the mudroom, I'm photocopying worksheets for the afternoon's school.

+ + +

Somewhere, I know, there is a homeschooling parent with the opposite problem who is resolving to learn how to multitask.  I can be quite effective, it's true.   BUT I can't multitask like that AND demonstrate love, interest, and delight.  Rather, such effectiveness tends to give me Resting Bitchface.  Not a good look on a mom.

 So here's resolution five:  Decide what I'm doing, and do that one thing.  

Leave room in my attention for that love, interest, and delight.

Leave room in my attention to be reasonable, to be kind, to be generous.

Leave room in my attention to stop and guide a child back on task before the urge to yell sets in.

Leave room in my attention for ...intention.

+ + +

So what kind of practical change can I make that will bring this about?  I think one of them is simply to look at what I've asked the kids to do, and to be doing that same thing.  

So, for instance, if the kids are working on schoolwork, I want to try to stay there with them instead of thinking, "Oh, they're working, I'll go get a head start on lunch."  

When it's time to make lunch, I am going to try to stop their schoolwork, and then we should all leave the schoolroom and start setting up lunch together.  Alternatively, if I need a little quiet time in my own head, I should send them on "break," while I set up lunch by myself or with just one child helper.

This also amounts to "quit multitasking," but on the family level.  My thirteen-year-old is really the only one who can reliably be sent to do something -- be it his algebra or scrubbing a toilet -- and finish it without getting distracted.  It's going to be fine to let him do his own thing.  The rest of them really do need attention and guidance whenever they are given instructions.

So I'm going to try that today, just as soon as I make my to-do list.

Good thing I never count "...and nursing the baby" as multitasking, or I'd never get out of this chair.