Power Hour

I've decided to go the bribery route with getting my kids to go along with new habits. Our mornings are a mess so I've started there, with the simple things we need to do every day to start our day -- eat breakfast, tidy from breakfast, teeth, dress, tidy bedroom (aka, make beds). This will be our Power Hour. Yes, I've given us a full hour to finish those things. If we can manage to get those things done in an hour from whenever we start, we've successfully completed our Power Hour. 10 days of successful Power Hours (now I'm regretting starting to capitalize that) means a new book for each boy. They've tentatively decided on books 2, 3, and 4 of the Dragonbreath series.

It went well today... until it didn't. The boys were excited at the start but we soon had pushback, mostly from one kid who hadn't really listened to the chores I listed and was indignant when he had to do more than he was expecting. I'm setting the bar pretty low here -- "making the bed" just means no bedding on the floor. We have four of the boys in one room among two bunkbeds. I make the lower two and don't worry about the upper two. And any laundry on the bedroom floor needs to be off the floor. Pretty low standards, so I was surprised to have someone yelling at me and calling it unfair.

We did manage to get it all done, though. We even managed to spend some time reading. We started with scriptures and there was jostling and jockeying for position on Mom's lap and squabbling on the floor in front of me. One kid was expressing his annoyance with another kid by relentlessly sticking his butt in the other kid's face. We moved on to Life of Fred math. That mostly went smoothly -- we had fun with skip counting -- but it ended in tears from a boy who despaired of being asked to draw an equilateral triangle because he couldn't do it perfectly. We wrapped things up with a book that is always a crowd pleaser: Aesop's Fables. One of the fables we read ended with a tortoise being dropped from the sky and "dashed to pieces" on the rocks. R gasped, smiled at me, and said, "That's disgusting!" I think he was pretty surprised that I was reading such a gross book to him.

That was the end of our school-y time. M was home sick with a bad cold and there was some tension and friction and such between M and R. We ended up watching a fair amount of Odd Squad, but I managed to get dinner made early, which is key on gymnastics night. Small victories.

CC Long's Home Geography came in the mail today. I haven't had a chance to take a look at it yet.