In Charge

The goal of being a stay at home Mom, is to mother.  Sometimes, in the midst of doing all that needs to be done to organize and maintain a home of 12 people, I somehow forget that and get lost in the paperwork, the projects, the writing I want to do, the distraction of the stuff on the internet, my own mind, and thus it was Anna and I hit upon a solution.

She is the officer of the break.  

She makes sure, we take a break every hour from whatever it is we were doing, to do something else. So I don't clean for an hour.  I clean for 45 minutes.  Then it's game time.   And we don't play for an hour.  We play for 45 minutes and then, I have 15 minutes to get rid of the paper work.   It's teaching her time management, and me as well.

The result?  The house has never looked better, my stack of stuff is far less than it was, and we've played Hoot, Owl, Hoot, read stories, played with toys, colored and hugged every day.  Why did it take until the tenth child to install a Break officer?   I don't know.  But I do know this, it's a much more fun day now that she's in charge of recreation.