Author name: Sandra Tayler

Sometimes inspiration coalesces rather than strikes. That was my experience as I contemplated the state of my house and my lack of time and energy to accomplish everything. I realized that I was doing too much picking up after the kids. This sort of maid work is a poor use of my time, and yet it needs done. The obvious answer is to make the kids pick up after themselves. Unfortunately this often takes more effort than just picking up after the kids, which is why I haven’t been making the kids do the work. I pondered this situation over the course of several weeks and a plan slowly came together in my mind.

I realized that I needed to institute a system of rewards and consequences. Not just for the kids, but for me as well. If there is no reward for me in making the kids do the work, then the system will have a very short lifespan. One frequent mistake in trying to institute reform is to take on too much at once. Total reformation can work if you have time and energy to really focus on it. I have too many other things, so I needed to pick a few areas of focus.

I decided to stop the accumulation of clothing on the bathroom floors. Those piles of shed clothing grow until I scrape up the archeological layers and put them in the laundry. I put up a sign in each bathroom that announced “Clothing is not allowed on this floor. If I find your clothing here, I will make you clean it up and assign you an extra chore.” That extra chore is the reward for me. By enforcing the rule I get some small task done by someone else. This makes the effort to make a child work, worth it. The extra chore is also a consequence for the kids. Ideally they’ll just stop leaving clothes on the floor and enforcement will never be necessary.

The front room is also a big clutter accumulator. The kids walk in the door and dump backpacks, coats, books, shoes all over the room. The same rule applies for the front room as for the bathrooms. If I find their stuff there, then they have to pick it up and do an extra chore. I didn’t hang a sign with the full rule on it, but I did hang a reminder sign over the couch. It says “this is not a dumping ground.”

The third area that was causing big problems was the video cabinet where we keep our games and movies. I kept finding discs left laying around with no cases. Controllers were left all over the room where they could get stepped on or broken. Games and movies teetered in great stacks. I cleaned the whole area up then hung a sign that says “put it away or it goes to jail.” In this case “jail” is our jail box. Kids can only get stuff out of the jail box by doing an extra chore. I announced to the kids that I was going to be very strict about movies and video games. I’m no longer warning or giving second chances. If these things are left laying around they’ll go to jail.

I’m almost looking forward to them leaving stuff laying around because the extra chores will make my house cleaner.

There is a hymn we sing at church which includes the line “scatter sunshine all along your way, cheer, and bless, and brighten every passing day.” The tune began running through my head about half way through parent/teacher conferences at Kiki’s junior high school. We had 6 teachers to visit. Each of the classrooms had a large whiteboard. Gleek and Patches were naturally bored at being dragged along, so in each classroom they left little deposits of artwork on the whiteboards. They drew little suns in red and green and blue. The red suns were suns. The blue suns were water suns. Neither Gleek nor Patches deigned to tell me what the green suns were. All these suns shone down upon lumpy water, hills, lava and the occasional fish. The hardest part of the evening was prying Gleek and Patches away from the current art project to travel to the next room. We could have been done in half the time.

Our last stop was the band room. The band room contained an array of impressive percussion instruments. Huge kettle drums, and big bass drums, and xylophones of various sizes, and full drum sets, and cymbals, and bongo drums, and chimes, and a gong, and a triangle they all beckoned to my four bored-and-tired-and-hyper children. It is fortunate that the band teacher has children of his own because there was no way I was going to be able to enforce a hands-off policy. Instead he asked that I enforce a hands-only policy. This prevented the kids from taking the gong mallet to the thin skin of the giant drum. We had to wait for about 15 minutes, but the kids didn’t mind at all. They ran from instrument to instrument, experimenting with all the sounds they could make. I wandered through trying to keep the volume to a minimum and to make sure that no damage was done. As I watched I wished that they had a chance to fully explore, to really make a bunch of noise with these instruments. That stuff was all so cool. I wish I could have played with it too.

We finally departed the school on a quest to purchase a dinner. The conferences had been preceded by an appointment and hours of invoice sorting. I had no energy left for cooking. The kids did not lack for energy though. They all ran ahead of me to the car.

Tomorrow Kiki will go to all her classes and see all the sunshine that her younger siblings left scattered behind. The thought makes me smile.

For the past while money has been tight. Time has been tight too. As a result I’ve accumulated a list of books that I want to take the time to read. Some of them I want to purchase as well because they were written or edited by friends of mine. My shelf of “books written by friends” is threatening to spill over onto other shelves. This makes me happy because it means that my friends are succeeding in their writerly aspirations. Anyway, the following books have caught my eye. Perhaps you might like them too.

At the top of the list is Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson. This book looks like lots of fun and I know it would appeal to my kids. I want to get it and let them all read it. As an added bonus I can get it signed by Brandon, which is always fun. Brandon has another book out that I also want to acquire Mistborn 2: The Well of Ascension. I loved the first Mistborn book and want to see how the story continues.

My friend Stacy Whitman edited another book that intrigues me, In the Serpent’s Coils by Tiffany Trent. This book is put out by Mirrorstone which is an imprint owned by Wizard’s of the Coast. I’m curious to read it.

There are a whole pile of books by Julie Czerneda that I want to read. I’m not going to list them all. But at the top of the list are A Thousand Words for Stranger and Migration: The Species Imperative 2.

A picture book by Anthony Browne caught my eye. It is called Voices in the Park and it sounds like book I’d really enjoy sharing with my kids.

Terry Pratchett has a new book out called Making Money. I love the Discworld novels. It always makes me happy to read a new one.

Robin McKinley has been a favorite author of mine since I was in junior high. She’s put out a book called Spindle’s End. I love her fairytale redactions, so I want to read this.

That is far from the entire list. I have other friends with books that are still forthcoming. I also have other books which catch or lose my interest. This list fluctuates from month to month. Sometimes I even get to remove books from the list because I actually got my hands on them.

I was standing in the kitchen. The light coming from the window was a soft grey. The patter of rain sounded softly against the windows. A feeling of happiness filled me as I lit a spiced pumpkin candle. The soft strains of Debra Fotheringham’s music blended pleasantly with the rain. My feet did a little dance of their own volition and I sang along.

I was so worried about this Fall. I was worried about keeping up the schedule. I was worried about getting the book done. I was worried about how the kids will do in school. I was worried if the book would even sell. But here I am on the first day of Autumn and all those things have passed. Instead I am happy. It feels like the holidays. Even my kids all noted that “it feels like christmas.” Christmas is a long way off. I have many things to do between now and then, but for today I am content. It is a moment of peace in the midst of my labors.

Tomorrow I will need to teach another creative writing class. Tomorrow I will need to clean house. Tomorrow I will begin sorting invoices for over a thousand book orders. Tomorrow I will continue editing livejournal entries for my book. Tomorrow I will write some fiction. Tomorrow I will begin working on the next Schlock book. Tomorrow I will work in my yard. Some of these “tomorrows” will actually be “later this week.” Some will even be “next week.” Some even further out than that. But for today I have peace and the scent of spiced pumpkin candle.

Last night all my kids had a spontaneous Art Time. Gleek and Patches were coloring. Link started drawing a comic full of Nintendo characters. When bedtime came, they left their art stuff out. Art Time continued this morning. But it was a little more conflict filled this time. Link finished his comic and wanted to show it to me. Patches wanted to see too, but Link declared that Patches couldn’t see until the comic was in a book. Patches wailed. He wanted to see his brother’s cool work. Link scowled, he wanted to maintain his right to decide who gets to look at his work. I attempted to negotiate a veiwing for Patches while honoring Link’s copyright. In the end, Patches was allowed to view when I was.

This is not the first copyright issue I’ve had to negotiate. Yesterday it was Gleek and Kiki.

Kiki has been drawing a lot lately. She’s been experimenting with Anime style art. Kiki is so pleased with her new style that she decided to get rid of some of her old work. She “got rid of it” by leaving the old drawings strewn across the front room floor. They sat there for several days. Then yesterday I got tired of the drawings being on the floor and asked Kiki if they were important or garbage. Kiki declared them to be garbage and began to clean them up. This would have been fine except Gleek heard the exchange. In Gleek’s eyes the drawings were beautiful and it was a tragedy that they were all going into the trash. Gleek tried to grab them, Kiki grabbed them faster. Kiki insisted that the drawings go into the trash. She didn’t want to see them laying around. Then there was crying.

I waded in and tried to argue with Kiki. It seemed spiteful to me that Kiki would rather throw the pictures away an let her little sister cry than to just let her sister have the pictures. It was definitely a power play on Kiki’s part. She was asserting her right to decide what happens to her art. In this house we are big fans of intellectual property rights. It felt wrong for me to just declare that Kiki had to give the pictures to Gleek. I leaned hard on Kiki to see if she would cave in. She would not. Gleek cried some more. Then I remembered that Kiki is attempting to save money to buy copic markers. I negotiated a deal where Gleek bought the pictures from Kiki. After that everyone was happy.

I’ve since made clear to Kiki that if she leaves pictures laying on the floor, that constitues a forfeiture of rights to those pictures. They enter the public domain and are available to anyone who wishes to pick them up. Print outs made from scanned pictures that Kiki has drawn will also have to be discussed. Kiki thinks that the other kids should pay her a nickel every time they print out a picture that she has drawn. So we’re going to have to discuss “fair use” and “duplication rights.”

It is amazing to see my kids starting to develop ethics about these things at such a young age. I suppose it is inevitable considering how we pay our bills. I guess I just didn’t expect to have to be judge and jury over intellectual property rights as well as physical ones .