Crammed dishwashers and other cool stuff

Mitchell and Sophie are learning how to load the dishwasher these days. Emphasis on learning hence the entire 12 piece place setting of glasses crammed into one load. Randy and I were talking away at the kitchen table soaking up the great feeling of having our children clean the kitchen. This is totally new for them. They’ve helped with setting and clearing the table for a long time but the rinsing the dirty dishes and loading the dishwasher is new. It never occurred to me to explain that you can’t just stack glasses on top of each other.

So when I opened this up this morning I cracked up and realized I’ve got to take the time to instruct a little better. But we were just so excited that they were doing it. I think we discovered a few weeks ago that they knew how to do this. They were keeping it a secret from us this whole time. Ha!

We are taking a “Financial Peace” class by Dave Ramsey and we are re-learning some good stuff. One of the things he encourages is for parents to give “commissions” instead of allowances to kids. Commissions (or money) for certain chores.

We’ve always had our kids do chores but they’ve never been paid for them. Their only source of money is for grades (we pay for A’s and B’s) and Birthday or Christmas. So this will be a new thing for them and us. We’re having to “budget” a category to pay our kids for their chores. Ha! That is just wrong feeling. But we’re going to do it. It won’t be a lot but it will be more than what they’ve ever had before.  We ordered this kit and will be talking about it with the kids at our next Family Meeting. I’m very impressed with it and think for the $20.00 that it cost it’s totally worth the life long principles our kids will be learning.

I want to share with you a huge provision of the Lord through some friends of ours. The rug you see below is a new rug that got damaged in delivery (the backing of the rug was cut). The company replaced it with a perfect condition one and told our friends to keep the other one or do whatever they wanted to with it. So they called us up and asked if we wanted it. Oh.my.word!

Such a huge blessing. It is beautiful and we are still in shock over the whole thing. The kids pretty much just rolled around all over it the night they brought it over to us. You’d think their bare feet had never felt carpet before but indeed we do have a few other rugs in our house. We are just still thanking God for this gracious gift given to us.