Improving

So that's a lot of good news in the last post. Something that is not going so great that we need to work on is finding happiness in the basics, the things we do every day, no matter what else is going on. There have been not a few complaints about scripture time and chores and things like dressing in the morning and brushing teeth. Maybe it's the kid in me that will never really grow up and disappear, but I still don't believe duties HAVE to be un-fun, even things that have to be done. I've heard plenty of people say that "kids need to learn that some things in life that just have to be done."  Yeah, but what about Mary Poppins' "element of fun"? Don't tell my mom, but to this day I still enjoy cleaning toilets. Toilets! (Maybe that's why my boys fight over who gets to do it!) And there's something very soothing about washing dishes by hand in a sinkful of warm soapy water. And on the days when I push through a few boring verses of scripture, I am always rewarded with something inspiring before I'm finished. To me, it is more an issue of attitude than one of duty. Yes, there are things that need to be done, but how we feel about them is up to us.

You can always find something negative in a task, but you can also always find something positive, even if it's the tiniest little good thing, it's there. In fact, we make clean-up a game every time if we can, and we're always thinking up new ways to play clean-up. Sometimes the boys get tongs from the kitchen and pretend that the clutter is hot lava rocks and they have to carefully pick the items up with the tongs to put away. Other times we do Tornado Clean-up, where we clean as fast as we can, sort of crazy like a tornado. We also do Box Clean-up, where we put a box in the center of the room and throw everything in the box as fast as we can, and it's instant gratification for us because it looks clean immediately, and then we put everything away from the box. Every now and then we do a competition, where the first person to clean up 4 things gets a chocolate chip, though I don't like this one as much, the boys sure do! Another way we haven't tried yet is to tape a line accross the room and have a competition to see who can get their side clean first.  I try not to be the one who invents the games, because it's also important for the kids to learn to find their own element of fun.  One game the boys made up is using their construction toys (dump truck and the like) to clean up, or they use their stuffed animals and pretend the animals are doing the cleaning.  Edit: Trevor just made up another game after I posted this. We played I Spy Clean-up: one person spies something on the floor that needs to be put away, and when another person guesses correctly, they put it away and get to spy something next.

Of course, I prefer that we don't get to the point where we have a whole room of junk to clean up and we strive to instead clean up as we go, but big messes are inevitable and it's better not to dread clean-up.

With scriptures, I just need to continue introducing variety.  Trevor is great with doing things the same way every time, but Conrad will start to crawl all over us and be very distracting if he's bored, which has been a lot lately.  We usually take the gospel art book and Trevor's large-print scriptures and use those to do scripture time, but I think Conrad needs more interaction still.  Role-play is usually his favorite.  If he gets a choice, Samuel the Lamanite is the story he chooses because he loves acting out the scene on the wall with arrows and rocks flying.  It's so simple and doesn't need any preparation, but is very effective.  We could also use the children's version of scriptures, which we haven't utilized in a long time.  I want my kids to love reading scriptures and to develop that love early on.  So we'll keep trying new things and finding that element of fun wherever we can.