I talked a little with Rob last night about romantic presents.
Oh! And I want to interrupt myself to mention something that is working really well for us: the concept of Dinner Helper. Each week, one of the two big kids is in charge of emptying the dishwasher (the weekly system was developed when we got tired of trying to figure out whose turn it was)
Oh! I want to interrupt my interruption! We have a useful way to remember whose turn it is with anything that involves (1) two kids and (2) taking day-based turns (for example, when two kids are taking turns setting the dinner table, or taking turns getting the first bath/shower, or taking turns choosing bedtime books). Here is the system: one kid is odd, and the other is even. Then as long as you know the date (iffy, I realize, but it can be discovered through research), and as long as everyone goes into it knowing the Odd Kid occasionally gets two days in a row (the 31st of a month followed by the 1st of the next month) and that this is a Good Example of How in Life Things Are Not Always Perfectly Fair, then you get to STOP ARGUING about whose turn it was yesterday! Instead you get to argue about which child is odd and which is even!—no, what we did was figure out a way to remember it. For example, if one child’s name has an odd number of letters and the other child’s name has an even number of letters, or if one child’s birth day/month is odd and the other child’s is even.
Back to the original interruption. Okay, so we do the dishwasher-emptying chore by weeks instead of by days, so each week one kid is Dishwasher Child. The OTHER kid is the Dinner Helper and has to help whichever adult is making dinner IF the adult wants help. Many nights, I’d rather be by myself in the kitchen. But some meals are more work, or some evenings we need to move faster, so then I have a Dinner Helper available.
At first, as with ALMOST EVERYTHING ABOUT PARENTING, having a dinner helper was more work than it was worth: I had to tell the kid EVERYthing, while ALSO doing my own work. Times two, because I trained both big kids. (The littler ones are seriously too much trouble to be worth it for me right now. I work on the philosophy of “Wait until it’s PAST the time they’re trainable for a particular task, and then it’s way easier to train them.”)
But at this point, now that we’ve been doing it awhile, it’s so worth it: I have my tasks and the Dinner Helper has his tasks, and the unexpected benefit is that it’s also Talking Time. The Dinner Helper does not always want to talk, and that works just fine too: we listen to the radio either way. But I’ve noticed all the kids seem to hover below their Preferred Attention-Getting Level, so generally there is talking.
Back to the original topic: this is Rob’s week to be Dinner Helper, and he asked if I had anything to talk about (we sometimes save issues just for Dinner Helper time), so I took the opportunity and I asked about The Girl and whether he was interested in dating her. He said that he HAD been: that the two of them had circled around the topic a bit, with her initiating the conversations about whether they should date—but then she started dating someone else, so he figures that’s a pretty clear indication that she came down on the side of no. He asked why I’d asked, and I said that a couple of his gifts to her recently had been of a sort that could SEEM romantic. He pointed out the girl is one of his two best friends, and that he had given similar gifts to his other best friend (also a girl). He said he likes to think of himself as a good gift-giver and so has been working on that.
So there we have it. I take anything a teenager tells me as The Official Press Release. That is, I’m not assuming this is the entire, complete, accurate story; I’m assuming this is the version I get with my Parent-Level Security Clearance.
Parent-Level Security Clearance! I love it!
Your last paragraph is PERFECT! Thank you for putting it into such concise words.
Joining the chorus of those who ADORED that last paragraph. I laughed out loud when I read that.
Please don’t ever stop blogging.
I also laughed out loud at the last paragraph.
Swistle, your posts are so incredibly helpful and insightful and wonderful. Thank you. This Dinner Helper thing is a BRILLIANT idea. Also the odd/even thing, although that won’t help when more than 2 need to take turns. Please solve that one next.
My family did weekly rotation by age. There were four of us.
I absolutely LOVE that you talk about your teenagers and the parenting of them. My oldest is 10 and I’m very nervous about what’s ahead. I was an awful teenager and my parents were awful parents of a teenager. I need guidance!
Parent-Level Security Clearance. YES! That sums up the concept so perfectly, and doesn’t have the negative connotations of “I assume anything my teenager says is at least half lie” or “I always assume my teenager is hiding something” Much more accurate to the actual assumption the way you put it!
That last paragraph is golden.
My kids, 13 & 8, each have one night of the week they are responsible for menu planning and then we cook the meal they planned together. But like as not the older one gets excused because of homework, so the younger one actually does it more often. Her next meal (Wed) is baked potatoes with toppings.
Back in the 60’s and 70’s, we had the Odd and Even system too but it was based on our birth dates. I was born on the 12th so I was Even. My brother was born on the 5th so he was Odd. The jobs we had related to meal times were slightly different than yours (all clean up, my mom did NOT want us helping prepare) but the system went into effect after much fighting over who did what last.
I really like Rob’s attitude. Maybe it’s because the mid-twenties dudes I am friends with are kind of immature and bad at empathy, but even being able to elucidate “I sort of wanted to date, she started dating someone else, I figure that means she doesn’t want to date me, but we’re still friends and I still want to treat our friendship as important” is about a million times kinder and more insightful than I’m used to. High five to Rob!
Parent-Level Security Clearance: yes.
I am a late-trainer, too. So much easier.
I agree that Rob sounds insightful for his age. I feel like a gushing fan girl for saying this pretty much every time I comment (although I do comment pretty rarely) but I really do enjoy reading your stories and I get so many great ideas from them. I figure the more you hear it the more you will be encouraged to never stop blogging.
Adding to the love for your phrasing in the last paragraph! And I also appreciate the insights into the small details of raising kids. Lately I’ve been dealing with some changes that mean that parenting may well not be on the table for me, and I’m realizing that I really like getting to experience the day-to-day stuff even when it’s vicarious. Especially when it comes to interesting solutions to these kinds of things.
I babysat for a family that did the even/odd thing, and to avoid the fighting about who is odd (and gets a few bonus back-to-back days per year) they found an offset. If kid A was odds and got to do a fun thing two days in a row, then they got a small bonus chore. If kid A was odds and had to do some chore two days in a row, they got a small bonus perk. The exact bonus chore/perks were dependent on the kid and their age, and came from a list of pre-agreed upon stuff. Things like an extra half serving of dessert, a fifteen-minute later bedtime one night, 15 more minutes of TV time, etc.
That last paragraph belongs in any compilation of Swistle’s Greatest Hits. You are a genius at analyzing things and then explaining your thinking in a funny, relatable way. Please keep blogging forever. Someday I will want to know how you deal with grandchildren issues!
My mom did the odd/even thing with us (my brother was born on the 25th so odd, me on the 8th so even). There were just the two of us and he was older, so it actually worked perfectly for my mom. More days? Eh, he’s older. I don’t recall her doing it for chores, but it worked for pretty much anything else that we wanted. Arguing about what to watch on tv/who got to sit up front/who got to take the first turn on something: all of these were met with “whose day is it?”
I have four kids so my mom has been saying I screwed up my chance for the odd/even method but I have single boy/single boy/twin girls all 2 years apart and I think there will probably some chances in there to do the big kid/little kid (boy/girl) split on things.
Yes! I have five and we still use the system ALL THE TIME. There are so many situations where we’ve divided the kids into groups just naturally (story time, for example, where older kids need different reading material than little kids), or where only two are fighting over something (a toy that only the two littler boys want, for example), or where only two of them share a chore because I am NOT dividing a chore by five!
I first found your blog before I had any kids and always thought how crazy it must have been at your house with that many kids! Now here we are at 4 and trust me I am taking all precautions not to have a surprise fifth. I love all your twin posts especially, and think I read them like 20 times when I was pregnant with the girls and totally terrified about what I was getting into.
Oh no! Sounds like Rob slipped into the friend zone :(
Thank you so much for this – “Wait until it’s PAST the time they’re trainable for a particular task, and then it’s way easier to train them.”
This is what I do but have had guilty feelings about it. Now that I know it’s a philosophy (and Swistle approved!) I feel better already!
I was just getting ready to say the same thing, EG1972! With twin almost 3 year olds that are not that interested in potty training, this is a philosophy I readily embrace.
Oooh, I am adopting the odds and evens thing immediately. And doing some googling to see if you have ever done a post on age appropriate chores (it seems like something you have done). I feel like my freeloaders need to start earning their keep!
Hm, I THINK I haven’t, but I’m not sure. Right now we have the little ones doing things like feeding the cat, using the dustbuster to vacuum, miscellaneous fetching. The older ones do things such as shoveling, mowing, unloading the dishwasher, helping with dinner. Everyone (from about walking age) helps with things such as “cleaning up before dinner.”
What Laura said – I worry that I end up coddling my kids too much because 1) I’m a control freak and I just want to do it my way and 2) I’m at home and they’re in school and I feel like I have the most free time. I love your system. And I wish I’d seen the odd/even system when it still mattered because one was born on the sixth and one on the seventh and it would have been PERFECT. Although they didn’t fight over that much anyway. Possibly because I wait on them hand and foot? Sigh. I also love the ‘wait until past time for training and then train them’. In particular, toilet training was a dream compared to some we knew who were determined it was going to happen on their timetable, not the kid’s.
First, awesome ideas. I love that you are so willing to put it out there that this is how you do things. It really is truely helpful in that you look outside the box on so many things.
I love the update on your children, especially since you put your interests on here so much. It reminds me to have a healthy balance.