Chore Lists

With four adults, one toddler and a cat living in the house now, there's a lot of things that are different. We go through dishes like crazy. And laundry. And it seems that Muriel and I are always the ones doing things, and if I tell the boys, half the time they space it. So I figured I'd try what worked back in college when I lived in the quad. A chore list.

Now, mind you, back then I made my own, simply by listing things that needed to be done, and then assigning them to everyone on the list. It's not unlike that today, except I can Google lists and get ideas for things I would forget. Like cleaning gutters. I should probably find out if we have gutters before I send one of the boys out to clean them. Probably would be wise. But I spent a good deal of time online with some chore lists, and then I even found a site that lets you add chores and people, and it assigns them for you. Which would be fantastic, if I wasn't such a control freak about it.

However, I figure a chore list is a good start, but things will need to be fluid, since as Dig and Muriel start working, I'll have to adjust things down for them, and sadly up for me. But, that site that assigns chores did give me a good look at the lists, and it seems to be like four or five small things a day for the most part. A few things are heavy, like taking down all the curtains and washing them, or moving the furniture and vacuuming. Those will need to be rotated to people's days off so we have help, because I'm so not doing that on a day when I'm alone with the Bug. It just doesn't seem toddler friendly.

I do, however, like the idea of getting everyone in the habit of doing chores everyday, and for most of them to be rotated. It isn't fair to Muriel to have her doing all the dishes, or to Dig having him always mow the lawns. At the same time, there's things I wouldn't ask them to do, like clean the cat's litter box. That's my baby, my responsibility.

I like the sites, because one of them gives ideas for daily, weekly and monthly chores. There's things that only need to be done once a month, like washing curtains. Something I would probably forget to do, because I haven't washed a curtain in the 3 years we've been here. I'm not even sure the living room curtains are washable. They look like they were new in the 70s. Were curtains washable in the 70s? I guess we will find out.