A Couple Successes

Can I just say thank you again to those of you who have made such nice comments on the last couple of posts?  You are awesome!!!

For anyone who is interested, I have updated our Rexburg Readers Blog.  We had a great discussion last night and I find myself grateful every month for our little book group.  Last night's discussion helped me continue this process of getting back on my feet and moving forward again.  I always feel refreshed and edified by spending time with fun women in our neighborhood and I love the books that everyone chooses.  We have officially been doing book club for a year now.  Thanks to everyone who has made it possible.  It's like a little life-line for me!!!

Yesterday I stumbled on something that I think is going to help in my quest to get my family engaged in being a part of making our home a better and cleaner place to live.  Somewhere, sometime I saw something from someone talking about how they love myjobchart.com.  So, I checked into it yesterday.  I looked at the videos they have on their homepage and decided to give it a try.  The basics are these:  you set up an account (it's free!) and then you can set up individual jobs for your kids including daily jobs, jobs they only do on certain days of the week, jobs they only do once, or extra jobs so they can earn more points.  Every job is worth points and they can use their points to earn rewards, they have even partnered with Amazon so you can reward your kids with books, DVDs, toys, games, ipods, etc., etc.  So, I spent time assigning my kids their jobs, setting up rewards, etc.  I taught my kids how to log on to check off their jobs and showed them some of the rewards they could earn just by doing their part to make our house a happy place to be.  We'll see if the trend continues, but my husband thinks that I have worked some kind of magic on the kids.  Last night and again this morning they were excited to do things I usually have to nag them to do.  You know, things like:  get dressed, brush your teeth, make your bed, pick up your toys.  What amazed me even more is that getting the kids involved made everyone anxious to create order - Dr. D and myself included.  Dr. D wants me to set up a list for him now so he can earn rewards too (I think he wants a new iPod;).  Like I said...we'll see if the trend continues, but I can see some serious possibilities here and I'm excited!

So...narrowing down my essentials has made a huge difference in my life over the last couple of days.  It has allowed me to feel successful and more enabled.  I'm sure I'll add a few more to my list over the next few weeks, but I can't even begin to say how big of a change this has made.  Serious answer to prayers here.