Friday, March 16, 2012

TGFF {Thank Goodness for Freebies}

Now that my kids are almost a year and a half I have been determined to have them start helping out around the house. Yes, I am wanting my 16 month old toddlers to have chores. I realize how dictatorial that sounds but let's face it, us mommies need all the help we can get! If that means having them throw their own diapers away or pick up the toys they routinely throw out of the playroom, then I will take it! Not only do the kids need chores but my husband does as well! This is not going to turn into a full on rant about how I want to beat my husband every time he says a snide remark about "the dishes needing to be done" or "the house needing to be swept." His exact words most times are "babe, you need to fill in the blank with whatever household chore my husband just realized needs to be done." OK, so maybe a little rant was going to come out but I just can't help it. I work the same amount of hours as my husband so there is no need for me to be the only one who "needs" to get things clean. I am a firm believer that a helpful household is a household running smoothly.
One afternoon after I put the babies down for a nap, I realized how much things HAD to change. The babies had thrown toys out of the playroom as usual and hubby just left his weights and dirty work shoes in the living room.
Now before you go judging me and thinking I must have OCD for thinking that the picture above deserves any amount of "chore planning", what the picture doesn't show is the couch full of clothes(and by full, I mean we actually gave it the name "Mt. Everest mini me") and a sink full of dishes, among a slew of other things(including two disgustingly dirty bathrooms.) I sat down on the couch and decided during this nap time I was actually going to be productive with my Pinterest ideas. I couldn't just write down our chores on a sheet of paper and call it a day. Where would the fun and motivational prettiness be in that? I decided I wanted something cute, yet functional of course. I have seen lots of chore lists that are dry erase and I figured that would be our best bet because the babies are still young enough where I need to tell them what their chore is every time they need to do it and they don't need visual aids(when they are around 2 I will do another one.) I also loved the dry erase idea because you can frame anything and write on the glass with dry erase markers! It is so easy!
I got to work and after looking at our decor in the kitchen(yes, my chore-list HAD to match) I decided on this:


As you can see, we all have our own responsibilities in the house and I am not the one feeling like I have to do everything or else it won't get done. Now, anyone can print a chore-list out and hang it, but does it really work? Well, I can tell you since I hung it up 2 weeks ago we have "checked off" what we had done twice BUT since  then, the babies already know where their dirty clothes and diapers go and they pick up their toys everyday! Hubby has done the dishes almost every night and vacuumed the living room AND one night I came home to him actually doing one of MY chores! He folded all the laundry!

If only I would have thought about this sooner!

So on to the Freebie!
I have two for you today. The one that I use for my family and a more neutral one. To Use: Download the files and open them in Photoshop. You will see the text layers where you can change the names as well as the chores. You can either print them out as 8x10 and frame them to use as dry erase or you can delete all of the text layers and then print them out and manually write the names and chores.
Click here to download freebie!
Click here to download freebie!

 Jenny

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