Task Badge Sanity!

Being a mama to six is wonderful! I love it!

 I love my children. They are so much fun and they help out around the house a ton!

 The whole first part of our day is devoted to helping the family (with some school snuck in, but they don't realize that!). After we had breakfast and devotions I would give the kids jobs and expect them to accomplish said job in a reasonable time frame, then give them their next assignment. The problem was, I am not so great at remembering things (like what I had just asked each of them to do), and my kids are regular kids. They would get distracted, lose focus, forget altogether what I had asked them to do or just plain disobey and play. Not all the time, but on a regular basis, which was not encouraging.

Right now, Berg and Pella have one task - to sort two loads of laundry and take the clothes down to the right rooms. It also helps them work together and Berg gets to "take care" of Pella which is something we've always taught the older kids to do for their younger siblings.

I realized I needed a better system to help all of us figure out what they were suppose to be doing so that I didn't have to keep giving consequences (sometimes to the wrong kid - oops!) for not doing what I thought I asked them to do. I had heard speakers years ago on this type of organization, but I didn't buy their materials so I didn't really know how theirs worked, but I guessed it went a lot like what I made up.

 I bought some name tag holders and printed up all the little tasks and more that I would normally give them during the morning. All the kids already have their own color, so I used ribbon to make them into necklaces.

Now I know exactly what each child is supposed to be working on! They can also look down and see what their supposed to do and know that a consequence will follow if they blatantly decide to disobey what their task badge says, knowing it's Mama who gave them these jobs and that they are really disobeying me if they aren't doing what they are supposed to do.

When the kids are done with a task, they take it out and put it in the task basket  Then they start right away on the next task  Sometimes they have to skip one, and go to the next if another child is on the computer they need, they need to do something with me or doing a job where they need to be doing one. (Washing dishes and washing the kitchen floor are hard ones to do together.) When they are all done with their badges, they get to pick a snack out of the snack bin. So they are usually pretty determined to finish before lunch.

 It's building character! I can already see them becoming more responsible, diligent, and taking initiative in their work! We've been doing this system since the end of February and I still love it! The kids love it. It's working so well! Praise God, because that old plan was not cutting it!

Advent

On November 30th we set up the tree and the littles "helped" by unwinding the lights and making sure they worked. Mama always puts up all the lights on the tree, the cranberry garland and the red ribbon first, but all we had time to do this night was get the lights put up. Their helping actually made it go much slower than normal, but they were having a great time lighting each other, making light crowns and getting them even more tangled in the process. Eben, Kivi and Jasper were busy Heelying down the driveway in the freezing cold with Dada.

I stayed up too late that night getting all the advents ready for the next morning. This year we have five advents because Pella is now old enough to take part in our little tradition which meant we had to add one more. So every morning the kids take turns doing a different advent activity. We made up a calendar so everyone knows what to do on what day.

Here are all of our 2013 advents:

Lighting the Advent candles and reading the scriptures:

 This is the second year we've done Advent with our family for Christmas. We use the book A Family Advent and love it. It keeps all the kids attention, has scripture to read each day, a fun fact about Christmas, a little devotion and activity suggestions.

Putting a nativity character on the calendar:

 Picking a candy cane off the candy cane wreath:

Picking a sock, which is filled with candy, (this is the favorite) from the railing:

Turing on the Christmas tree lights:

Waiting and being happy for your siblings who get to do an advent activity:

 The first day of December Opal had to wait and she did an amazing job! It's been a little harder for Berg and Pella to take their turns waiting.

First Stop Egypt!

We finally started "school" a.k.a."Just Learning" the second week of September. The start up was a bit more rough than other years. We went so many places and had many visitors during our summer so I couldn't school them right through like I had all the other years. I worked hard on figuring out a schedule where I could teach all four of them. That was new and required a tighter schedule, and we're still figuring it out. 

 After our initial "Book About Me Week" the kids decided to spend our first month of homeschooling in Egypt, Ancient Egypt actually. We built pyramids, learned how to embalm and wrap a mummy, we designed our own pharaoh crowns, wore Egyptian eye makeup (it wasn't just for girls!), drew maps, wrote our own hieroglyphic stories and read lots of books.

Little Fall Lessons

I love fall! I think it's my favorite time of year. This year it kind of sprang upon me. I realized I was suppose to start homeschooling, get Jasper's party ready, direct our church's Cubbies program and manage our home all at the same time and I wasn't ready. So we started our school a little later in the year than the kids who go to school. (We can do that, because I'm the teacher and I decide when we start!) I took some time to get my little babies in order. Well, first I had to make a baby - a sock baby, so I made a Pella. This seems unimportant, but sometimes these little details make it easier for me to focus on the bigger picture. Now I have a complete little sock baby set in the homeschool/ dining room. Lesson: Do the fun things, the other things will always be there to do later.

Then I got our little lives in order. I created a very structured schedule. I've never tried this type of structured schedule before, but working around Pella's feeding schedule, and working with all the kids one on one with school it had to be done. And it works! The kids look at it all the time and check to see what they're suppose to be doing and follow it! Mostly. We do have flexibly lax days sometimes. This has been a great sanity to our little, loud home. I love how the middle kids have stepped up to the times when they are scheduled to take care of their littler siblings! Who knew this would work so well!
By the way, on the first day of school this year the kids cried and said they didn't want to do school, and they were so sad and it made me sad. So on the second day of school I told the kids we were no longer doing school. From now on we were not going to have school. We were only going to learn stuff and they were so relieved and so happy. So now we don't even do "school" over here. We just "learn stuff".
Lesson: Kids can follow a schedule when they know what the schedule is (and the word school is not on the schedule).

Every fall we make "Happy Fall" muffins to hand out to our neighbors and drive around to our friends. The kids each get to pick a family to give muffins to. This year we made pumpkin chocolate chip and pumpkin cream cheese muffins but had no time to drive them around to our friends, so we gave them to our Awana leaders and our Cubbie volunteers. 

Lesson: Friends are everywhere so give the ones you see muffins.

The kids love, love, love their new dentist, Dr. Beck, at Fircrest Pediatric Dentistry! They all get to go into the big room together where they each have their own chair, movie and dental hygenist. Then Dr. Beck comes and looks at them all and I just follow him around the room and hear what he has to say about each one. It's so fun and they are so nice! Fall dentist check-ups - check! (Except Eben has to go back and get some cavities fixed.)

Lesson: Mama has to do more brushing!

This fall we had an experimental honey harvest. Removing the frames from the hive went well. Shmee and I got all the frames out fine, except I think some of the bees may have swarmed because there weren't as many bees as we've had before, but who knows because these are a new type of bee to us. We have Italian bees this year, they seem littler and way less aggressive.

The experiment was our new extractor which we purchased online cheaply, and now we know why, all the frames we tried to spin, broke. Oops. I think it had something to do with the drill being too fast and the frame holder putting too much torque on the wrong part of the frame, plus a lot of the honey was from our last bees, the Carolina ones, so it was super thick and heavy.

The kids sure liked it though, they got to lick a lot of broken frames of honey.

Our friends came over to get a lesson in honey harvesting. Sadly we were not very good teachers of how the process should go as we failed to extract any honey.

This was the messiest honey year ever. We ended up having to cut all the honey, wax and all, off the frames and into a mesh bag to hang and drain into the brand new trash can container. The process is still not finished. Gravity isn't even working to pull the honey out of the wax. So, we'll have to squeeze it out at some point. Now we know the importance of a good extractor.

Lesson: When your cheap-o extractor breaks all your frames; get sticky, eat the honey and next year buy the expensive extractor.

 We went to the Steilacoom History Museum's Apple Day and found out that no one uses all the apples in the little orchard. They said we could come back and pick them. So we did! We picked 2 huge bins full of apples! Peter was an amazing apple peeler and canner! Who knew he had such skills. He totally got the canning bug. (I think it was all those Mother Earth New magazines we got from a neighbor.)

We made so much out of all those apples. No part of them went to waste. He made applesauce and canned apple slices. I made dried cinnamon apple nests out of all the peels and apple curd and jelly out of the cores. The small part that was left over we fed to the chickens!

Lesson: When life gives you free apples, can them!

Opal finally got her first haircut (not counting when we cut her bangs). Her hair was actually going into the toilet when she went to the bathroom, so she decided it was time to cut it. I trimmed it up to her shoulders and it's so much easier to do now! Plus, it doesn't get into her food when she eats, or the toilet - bonus!
Lesson: If you can wipe with your hair, it's time to cut it off.

Random Things of March

I finally finished my new schedule! It's been a long time coming. I think the last one I had on the fridge forever was from Feb. 2011! So we definitely needed a new one. Our schedule helps us in so many ways. The kids do so much better with routine. And I don't get blamed or argued with about what comes next. My friend Laura told me about this with a timer, she'd say, "Oh, the timer just rang. That means it's time to clean up. I wish we could play longer, but the timer said it's time to clean up." And the kids would just agree. It works the same with the schedule. "The schedule says it's time for school." And look at that, yes it does. No arguing with the very official looking document on the fridge. The kids are also very excited to have a new schedule, because I put their new pictures on it and it makes it personal to them. There's no doubt this schedule belongs to them their face is right on their. Except for poor Pella, I completely messed her schedule up on here. Oops. I'll have to fix it later.

Eben and Kivi were out in the garden beds helping me till the soil and Eben started digging up carrots left over from last year. They got so excited to find them, you'd think they found gold. They found a whole bucketful of carrots, which were way sweeter than when we harvested them in the fall. Are suppose to leave them in the ground all winter? Eben said, "I have to admit it Mama, this gardening stuff is way more fun than I thought it was going to be."

I started putting Pella in cloth diapers. I started cloth diapering, not full on hard core, just when I feel like it, and never out in public, when Opal and Jasper were in diapers. I knew I didn't want to do newborns, because they wet them all the time and we already do a ton of laundry around here. So now that Pella fits the small size, she gets to wear them. I don't know what my kids will think when I tell them they wore hand me down diapers. It sounds gross, but they get washed, and I'm cheap. They just make their little booties look so cute and ginormous! Pants barely fit over them. Or in this case, they don't at all.

Another new thing we started doing recently is our change to big cups! The Bigs and the Middles all drink out of glass mason jars now. I put hair rubber bands on them so they know whose is whose. Eben is red, Kivi is green, Jasper is yellow and Opal is pink - this is true for many of their things. Those are their colors. I was going to do a reward thingy for if they drink their whole water cup in one day, but they drink a ton anyway and I never got around to the little incentive chart. So maybe I'm off the hook! Either way, they are way cute to look at on the table and I don't have to keep getting up and down to refill cups through the whole meal.

A Day In The Life Of A Johnson

On June 4, 2008, I decided to take pictures all day and record what we do all day. We have a family schedule and we usually follow it pretty well, some days, we have to be flexible, like this day. Because other things come up. So here's our little schedule that's always on our fridge:

8:30 - eat breakfast, Eben had granola, Kivi and Jasper had raisin toast. I feed Opal while they eat.

8:45 - Got dressed. Eben goes with Kivi to her room to get her clothes and Kivi goes to Eben's room with him to get his clothes, everyone brings their clothes back to the living room and we all get dressed together.

9:30 - "Word World" A TV show that they watch, they get to choose between Super Why or Word World, two great shows that teach about letters and reading.

10:00 - Jasper and Opal take a nap. Eben and Kivi have school time. Today Eben worked on capital letters and Kivi worked on drawing diagonal lines.

10:30 - Eben did reading and Kivi played

10:45 - snacks and then more playing

11:30 - Jasper wakes up and we all eat lunch - turkey rolls, string cheese, broccoli and carrots.

12:00 -Opal wakes up and I feed her

We forgot to brush teeth.

12:15 - Jobs - Kivi cleaned the table, and Eben took the clothes out of the dryer.

12:30 - Eben wanted a Special Helper Rocket so he sorted the clothes. Kivi and Jasper played.

Played until nap.

2:00 - Nap time for everyone! Until 4:00.

6:00 - Here's where our day was much different than normal. We picked up Mr. Andy's RV so we could go camping. We parked at church to have an egg roll dinner, cause Dada had to mow the church lawn. Opal took a nap in the back of the RV.

6:30 - They had to eat all their egg roll before they could go on the tractor. No one really liked the egg rolls. It took them a long time to eat just 1/2 of an egg roll. Eben and Kivi got rides with Dada. Bubba was terrified. After their rides, they got ice cream sandwiches from Rusty.

(My camera died, so I didn't get to take pics of the rest of the day.)

7:00 - We watched "Madagascar" in the RV. And Dada finished mowing just as the movie ended.

9:00 - We took the RV home, put on jammies, brushed teeth and went to bed.

And that's a day in the life of a Johnson.