It's a Hard Knock Life (for Dyl)
Melissa Summers posted a great piece on Blogging Baby this past week regarding chores and allowance. Dylan has never asked for allowance, but after reading the post, I realized that it was high time we gave her one.
She doesn’t need the money. As the first grandchild, she has
more than enough crap to keep her occupied for the next ten years. And, she has
more shoes than I do. No, it’s not the money. Dylie needs the allowance because
she has never grasped the concept of pitching in around the house.
As I’ve mentioned before, Dyl attends a Montessori
preschool. She is WONDERFUL about picking up after herself at school. According
to her teachers, she even picks up after the OTHER kids. At home, though, she
seems to have zero respect for the cleanliness of this house. She routinely
drops her jacket on the floor after walking in the door (my mom laughs when I
tell her this, explaining that it’s retribution for all the years I did the
same thing as a child), she empties her backpack onto the floor, she moves from
one activity to the next without cleaning up the first, etc. etc. It’s become
horrible, and I’m tired of nagging and harping on her day in and day out.
The chore chart that Melissa references seems like an ideal solution. We have offered Dylie a weekly allowance of $2 in return for checking off all of her chores every day. The $2 will be allocated as follows: $1 to savings (her piggy bank), $.50 to a charity (she picked Weimaraner Rescue) and $.50 for anything she wants (Dylan says that what she wants most right now is a ring that doubles as a pot of lip gloss).
Yesterday was the first official day of the chore chart, and so far it is going very well. She straightened her room and made her bed before we left for breakfast and she straightened the household shoe corner as well (a community job that I KNOW she can accomplish). Weekends are easy, though, so I’m eager to see how well she handles the weekdays when she is more distracted by her day-to-day activities. Today was kind of hard because she came home sick from school again (this time with a high fever and vomiting – fun). She did straighten her room and make her bed before she left for school this morning, though, so I’ll probably cut her a bit of slack.
