Chore Day

Today is Friday which happens to be a day that I really like. It is the start of the weekend so the kids come home and hang up their backpacks and coats with a sigh of relief. It is also chore day and pizza & movie night. When we first started Friday chore day a few months ago the kids would drag their feet and whine and take an hour to do a 5 minute chore because of how "unfair" it was. Josh is still downstairs "working" on cleaning out the playroom. It could have easily been a 20 minute job, but he is 2 hours into it now. He is just sitting in there and whenever I walk by he tells me it is too hard. Common sense would teach him that if he just put the things away in the right place when he finished with them he wouldn't be there right now, but he has been doing this chore for 7 months and that message has never connected in his brain. I expect that common sense will take many more years to properly develop. Jackson, however, made a startling revelation a couple weeks ago. He realized that if he worked hard and fast the jobs would be over with quickly and he could go on to playing. Today he asked for his chores as soon as he walked in the door and got started immediately. He was done with everything in 30 minutes and has spent the rest of the afternoon playing his favorite computer game. Pretty smart guy!

We will go make salad and pizza in a few minutes. We started this tradition by trying Papa Murphy's take-n-bake and various other frozen and delivery pizzas. It turns out that the pizza we enjoy the most is homemade, and saving the money is nice too. After that we will have popcorn and a movie. The kids are at a fun age for watching movies because we don't have to watch cartoons anymore and we can find movies that we all like. Last week we watched Wizard of Oz. This week I rented ET and Herbie. There are so many fun 80's movies that I want to watch with the kids. I have the next several weekends lined up: Goonies, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Who Framed Rodger Rabbit, Gremlins, Parent Trap. It will be so fun to watch these movies again, and to see the kids watch them for the first time.