Honoring my mother here will help you with some original parenting tips; I promise. Do you have an extremely difficult time getting your children from young ages to teens to do work around the house? Have to justify to the younger ones why the older one's get more money?
My mother's system is full prove. Mom gave us age appropriate tasks. Here comes the trick. Tell the kids, "Any money you find you can keep!" This system serves as a tracking and monitoring system. If your memory is lacking; write down where, how much money and the task assigned to each child. If all the money is gone, then the child should have cleaned well. You have to hide it good enough to get the results you want. Design the task so it is fair for the child's ability. We were motivated to do the chores for what ended up to be our allowance. Mom is quite an inventive lady.
Mom's of teens that are driving and have a curfewcurfew; want to know what time they come up but not sit up and wait on them? Are you a light sleeper or at least you can wake up if a pop bottle is kicked over?Tricky mom used to put out two to three litter bottles of cokes right in the walking pathway of coming in the door. You would have to kick them over in the dark. The noise would wake mom up so she could look at the clock and deal with you the next morning. You can bet she did deal with us if it was after curfew when we snuck in under cover of dark instead of on time turning the lights on.
Want a car game that everybody can play, even the driver? This game is obscure in origins. We grew up on it as we traveled all over the US and Canada. Zip-Zip is what we called it. The idea was to get as many horses as one could. If you said zip-zip,it was a group of horses and you were first then those horses were yours. A white horse counted as two. If you ziped a cow you lost all your horses. This may seem weird but wheever anybody saw a cementary the first to call out slppsky got everybody's horses. You can divide the teams into front seat and back seat or boy's against the girls. Better yet think of some way you want to divide teams your way. It is competitive and funny.
I was the youngest in the family. Often nobody wanted me to be on their team. You guessed it; I zipped a lot of cows being eager to win. One time I saw a mountain lion chained lying underneath a car. Learning my lessons, I screamed, "Is that horse? Is that a horse daddy?"
My dad couldn't believe his eyes. We stopped and talked with the owner. I even got to pet it that day. I have to admit that is a strange event. I had never seen a mountain lion but I didn't loose my horses that day
Did you like my "Hand Me Down Tips From My Mom?" I may make this an event giving more of her secrets. Then again I might want to keep her wisdom to myself. Lots of great stuff from my mom!
This can be seen on my blogs too but was posted her on Bloggy Mom's first!
