Day: February 24, 2005

One month ago today I declared a New World Order at the Tayler House. (http://www.livejournal.com/users/sandratayler/58783.html) I thought it would be appropriate to examine how well I’ve done at maintaining it.

1. I’ve been better about requiring kids to do their morning things and one chore, but not consistent every day.

2. I’ve been much better about not doing kids work for them. It means “Saturday Morning Work” usually takes most of the day, but at least I’m not the one doing all the work. Kiki took 6 hours to fold a basket full of laundry and moaned about it the whole time, but she did it without any help and the next time I bet it won’t take as long and there will be less moaning.

3. Kitchen helpers have been more missed than hit. I have been grabbing kids and asking for help more often, but not requiring focused effort from a single child on a particular night. I still feel like this is a good idea, but I may need to re-assign the nights because of some schedule shifts.

4. Quiet time went really well for a few days, then Patches started being resistant and everyone got sick so I gave up. I need to give it another try because I really think it was working. I may need to limit Patches involvement to 5 minutes though because he is so young. Sometimes the best answer is to be patient until kids are older.

5. We’ve played the Tayler Family Game exactly once. Between illness and Howard’s scheudle and other random events we simply haven’t made time for it. Once we’ve weathered the Gwavaman event that has Howard buried I’ll see if I can’t make it happen.

So in all, not perfect, but not too bad either. I do feel like some things are more in my control. The point of the new world order is to make family life run more smoothly over the long haul, sometimes that means ignoring it for short periods of time and then reinstating it. Time for me to refocus myself yet again and make it happen.