7th June 2012
I’ve been a little terrified for summer break to arrive at our house. Samuel is 2 weeks old today and I’m still recovering and readjusting. Not sure if I’m ready to entertain a house full of littles.
So what to do with my other kids home all day?? I’m not exactly up to running around town to parks and pools yet but the last thing I want them to do is watch tv and video games all day while I sleep (I totally want to though!!) I’ve been thinking and I want to have some sort of structure… but something realistic. Something I’ll be able to follow through with.
This is what I have come up with.
It might not look like much but let me explain. I made up a little schedule for me and the kids. Every week day the kids are expected to do one quick chore, make their bed, feed their pet, and do a bit of math or reading. If everyone does this in the morning they earn a star on the calendar. Once they have completed a week of stars then they earn a Summer Reward Activity to do on the weekend.
The Summer Reward Activities are a bunch of fun things around town that they are ALWAYS asking to do. Some are real big activities like a water park and some are small things like getting a Sno Cone. We will check them off the list and at the end of the summer we can see all the fun things we’ve done together. Some can be done on a Friday afternoon and some we’ll do on a Saturday when Daddy can go with us.
Here is what the week day schedule looks like. Again, nothing very fancy.
Today was our first day and it was a total success. It helped that Sam slept through the whole thing too. We weeded outside for a half an hour, did our math and fed our pets. We were done with everything before 10:00 in the morning. YEA!!
I gave them all high 5s and said, “Alright, now you can go play.” After a few attempts to find a friend I had them all rolling around on the floor saying they were bored.
Great!?! It’s going to be a long summer.