1 Comment

Chore Chart

2012
03.13

I’ve gone from working around 30 hours a week to upwards of 43 hours a week in the past two months, and you can tell by the state of my house.  Having afternoons when I could be around the house with the kids was nice, and things definitely were running more smoothly.  So I’ve felt like things were spinning a little out of control lately.  And how do I regain control?  By browsing Pinterest, looking at chore charts.

I looked at a couple of varieties and decided to make my own.  First, I asked Charles for a plank of wood from his scrap pile.  It had already been finished, and was a little weathered, but I liked how it looked and it kind of matched our woodwork.  There was a cute chart on Pinterest with this Maya Angelou quote, and I liked that too.  But Charles didn’t feel like the sharpie was visible enough:

 

So I traced over it with a silver paint marker, leaving a little sharpie showing behind it so that it looked like a drop shadow.

 

Next, cup hooks for the ‘to do’ and ‘done’ tags under each name:

 

I found these tags at an office supply store.  I think they are for rummage sales or estate sales, and I just printed out chores and glued them on.  I’m using the bottom hooks for chores that we don’t need to do this week.

We are working on a game now, and maybe there will be some prize for the person with the most completed tags at the end of the week, and you can steal them from each other when you complete your own or something.  I’ll let you know how that shakes out.  And whether I finish the week feeling more in control of my life.

Tags: , , , Category meaningful labor |

2 comments

Aquaponics update: and then there was one.

2012
03.12

We are down to one fish in the aquaponics experiment out of the three we started with.   Here’s an excerpt of Dillon’s paper on the topic:

I started the project with three fish.  My fish are a chocolate oranda named Shadow, a redcap oranda named Ron, and a butterfly tail goldfish named Shy. [A bunch of research paper deleted here.]  I had a number of problems with the fish part of the experiment, though I was on the lookout for these problems thanks to my reading.  I first had a pH problem, because the pH of the water would spike and get too high for the fish, and we had to lower the pH by using a product called pH down.  Then I had a temperature problem, and the water was too cold, so we got an aquarium heater. Finally, I had an oxygen problem, which I realized because the fish were gasping for air at the top of the tank.  We got an oxidizer for the fish to solve this problem. We lost two fish during the experiment probably due to these problems, or the fluctuations in these elements.  The book I was working from, Aquaponic Gardening, told me to expect this and suggested to gardeners to start their cycle with goldfish rather than tilapia or perch because you often lose fish when you are starting up your system before all of the levels are regular enough and stable.

So, Shy and Ron are no longer with us.  What the writing above doesn’t really tell you is the level of hysteria that my kids felt at the death of Shy.  They kept it together a bit more when the second one, Ron, died.  (Poor Ron Weasley, I think it wasn’t as sad because they didn’t really notice he was sick, Shy was clearly not doing well for a while.)  And Shadow is looking a little shady.  But we’re testing everything and the water seems to be habitable for the fish, with an appropriate pH, ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates.  I’ve had a number of (even long-lived) goldfish in my life, and never kept them in such luxury or cared about the chemicals in the water, which often wasn’t changed particularly regularly.   Did we just get lemons in the goldfish department?  It’s only been six weeks – I thought for sure we could keep at least one alive for a couple of months.  Thoughts?

 

Tags: , Category meaningful labor, reciprocal affection |

1 Comment

Tread Lightly

2012
02.28

Sometimes, as a parent, you just hear something happening in the other room and you don’t want to mess it up by actively noticing.  It is the Hawthorne Effect of parenting, as soon as you are observed observing the event, it changes it.

I had to risk a quick photo, though, tonight when I told the kids it was reading time and Rose headed into Dillon’s room and cuddled up next to her brother and began to read out loud (you know, like you do when you are a second grade reader).  I think D was initially ignoring her – he can ignore anything when he has a book in his hand – but then he started helping her with the words she got stuck on.

Kids and a Book

So they just hung out and read.  Happily, they ignored me completely when I silently snuck in and took the picture.   Rose just kept reading to her big brother.  And I might have let them stay up a little later than usual because they were being so awesome.

Category reciprocal affection |

3 comments

A new hope

2012
02.26

We’re trying to toughen up Dillon a bit.  It occurs to me that perhaps a kid shouldn’t get super-offended and tear up at a professional soccer game because some rabble-rousing fans are holding up signs that says “the Wave sucks.”  (He turned to his grandpa and said, “That is just SO inappropriate!”)

Don’t get me wrong, I love that he is a sweet, sensitive kid.  But he’ll be entering 6th grade (maybe at a new school next year) and probably he should be able to handle unsportsmanlike behavior and just let it roll off, you know?

So what is my strategy for this, you ask?  [Drumroll….]   I am making him watch movies.

We don’t watch a lot of TV as a rule, no screens on school nights pretty much ever, unless you need to type up some homework or something.  And when D does have screen time, he’d rather play a videogame than watch a movie.  But I am forcing the issue a little (in a very nice way), and so we’ve watched Ghostbusters, Goonies, Star Wars: ANH (that’s Episode 4 if you don’t know), and Lord of the Rings: Fellowship and the first disk of Twin Towers (it’s the 3+hour director’s cut, so we had to stop midway through because it just got too late).  Basically, we’re nerding it up by watching all my favorite movies.

I’ll let you know if he learns the important life lessons from Han Solo and Gandalf and Mikey and Egon.  In the meantime, it’s just pretty fun to watch these again with my kid.

Category hope for the future |

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »