Canning!

Guess what? I got to learn how to can this week! It was a lot of fun! We canned peach jam and cherry jam! We already got to taste the peach and the first jar is nearly gone already! I couldn't can and take pictures at the same time...but here are some pictures of the finished product:

Peach Jam!

Cherry Jam!

I can't wait to taste the cherry tomorrow!

"Chores are Fun"

"Thanks for letting us do our chores, Mom. Chores are fun, I like mopping the floor," my little brother said a few days ago. Wow! He has never said that before! We usually have assigned chores to do, but yesterday Mom decided to try something new. She had ALL of us do ALL of the rooms together! So we set the kitchen timer for five minutes and started cleaning the den. (Now, remember that I have five younger siblings, and we make big messes.) And we got it done right as the timer went off. We did the same thing with the living room, the dining room, the hall and foyer, and the kitchen. It worked great! And we got the main part of the house done in record time.

As I already said, we had assigned chores, so now we are working together to clean the main part of the house. I say the main part, because we are not working together to clean our bedrooms! Personally, I like working on my chores by myself, so I didn't think I would like doing this. But getting it done that fast was awesome, so I think I like working together on chores better now.

cleaning

Cleaning is not always fun, especially for the younger kids. If you have kids, they are going to hate me for this. :) But something they figure out is that it can be fun if they make up their minds that cleaning is a good thing to do, not a punishment. Of course you can "earn" extra chores by disobeying or talking back, but cleaning is something everybody needs to do. Because everybody makes the mess. Shocking!:)

Don't you always eat off of a clean dish when you eat dinner? Don't you always drink out of a clean cup? But how do those dishes get cleaned everyday? How can you go to sleep in a nice warm bed every night? Who provided it? Who washes your blankets when they get all dirty? There is someone behind the scenes that does these things and more for you!( or maybe you are the person who is behind the scenes).

Helping out with the housework is a fact of life! But there is an age limit for doing chores! When the child starts walking is when, I think, they should start helping with little chores, like cleaning up their own toys. One thing I have realized is that the older you get the more chores you get! Because as you get older you are trusted by your parents more to get your work done.

Another thing I have realized is that the more kids that are in your family does NOT mean a smaller amount of chores, it sounds right, does it not? I mean, the more people you have in a family the less you have to do right? WRONG! The more people you have, the more stuff you will have. So really, the more people you have in a family sometimes means more work to do, because the younger ones can't always be depended on.

Back to the first subject, I have learned how to make myself do extra chores without mom or dad asking me to do it. How? Well, if you live in a house that has flat surfaces, counters, a kitchen bar or island, a table, then you know that they are magnets for papers and just STUFF! In our home we rarely find the "time" to clean off these surfaces. It isn't fun is it? But when it does get clean it looks so nice, doesn't it? So that is what motivates me to clean. Another example is when my sisters and I clean our room(I share a room with two of my sisters) it looks better when clothes aren't all over the floor, so we always say that we will keep it clean this time. But that never happens, one day it will be clean and the next day it will be a complete disaster! How? We always say we will do it later, but in reality, LATER almost never happens.

Cleaning CAN be fun if we make up our minds to it, it is just something we learn over time:).