April 3: Chores and Allowances for Little Kids

Off topic: You probably did not notice a super annoying mistake I made the other day, but let me just tell you about it anyway. Sometimes I multitask well and other times I'm finding out that I just cannot do two things at once. For instance, I was doing paperwork from my work day on my laptop and also felt the need to pull up Blogger on my desktop. I thought I hit 'publish' for new comments, but instead I somehow clicked 'remove content' for the previous 50 already published comments on the blog. So yeah, good thing that wasn't a giant time suck for me to attempt recovering those 50 precious comments.

I eventually figured out a way to manually re-enter a few of the newest comments back into Blogger though my email but it's still a little botched. And I cannot do that for all 50 or I will be forced to drink a six pack of beer and stay up until 1 am some night, and if I do that I don't want to be sitting behind a computer screen;)

I'm sorry, blog commenters. I do still have them in my email if I want to read them again but for the most part, it's just going to look really shady in the comments section of the past two-ish months of posts. Promise I didn't mean to 'remove content' for all of your comments. ANNOYING, but lesson learned. Don't multitask with computer things, especially in the evening hours when your brain is basically fried. You'd think I would have figured this out by now but I'm not as tech savvy as I pretend to be.

Also related to comments? A few readers have said that it's really difficult to comment on my blog without a google account. Many of you said it would be much easier to have a 'name/URL' option and in order to do that, I also have to allow anonymous comments which means about ten spams a day. It's not a huge deal since those go right into the spam folder of Blogger but I just have to sort through the email notifications on them….BUT I will give it a try in the name of making it easier for a few of you. Please do take advantage of this new 'easier' commenting on Blogger, as if there is such a thing;)

Real matter of this post: Do your young children get an allowance? Do they have specific daily or weekly chores? How old are they, what kind of chores are theirs to do, and how much money to do give them?

I remember having an allowance growing up and swear it was a dollar per week IF I adequately filled out my chore chart. I'm not sure how old I was when this began and can't recall all of my assigned chores, but I know making the bed was one of them. I also vividly remember being super excited about vacuuming landing on my personal chore list. I still love to vacuum so it's a shame we have all hardwood (but our area rugs get my favorite task about twice per week!). 

I like the idea of chores and also an allowance to help teach Truman and Cecelia responsibility, so they can have a sense of pride after cleaning up their own messes and so that I'm not muttering to myself 'they are old enough to help' as I quickly pick up after them. Plus, I think Truman especially can begin to learn the concept of money, how much things cost, how to save for a bigger item, the value of a dollar, etc. 

Pinterest probably has 100s of ideas for me with color coded chore charts and what not, but I wanted to come here first (and probably Instagram). I wonder if simply making their beds, picking up all toys at the end of the day, and helping me wipe down counter tops and the tables would be good enough for now? Maybe it can be a group effort, we can get them piggy banks, and have conversations about how 'if you want that toy at Target, you can save your own money for it,' instead of just saying 'nope, wait until your birthday/Christmas.' 

Thoughts?

I think two of the kids pictured here are ready for chores and allowance. Porter and Baby White (resting in her car seat on top of the BOB, likely to fall within seconds of this picture) are exempt. Also, the double BOB can haul some children like none other. And Truman and Cecelia have identical grins.