Parenting 101: Housework

Cleaning day in our house is on Sundays. We try to keep up with the clutter throughout the week to make it a less daunting task on Sunday, and seem to be succeeding more often than not.
Trying to get the kids to clean is generally more work than the cleaning itself. But they are getting better and better with this and with fewer complaints. This past Sunday Jonah was awesome with the cleaning. I don't think I heard one complaint as he picked up his room and cleaned up the toy area(s) around the house.

Brielle is the ever helper. She wants to help no matter what. This isn't always all that helpful, but we encourage her anyway. When it comes to the laundry, shes right there eager to pull everything from the basket and hand it to us to fold. Unfortunately this includes the previously folded items as well. But she's almost 2, so who can complain?

Cleaning is not all that fun, but we try to get it all done so that we can have some fun as a family. Generally we are too exhausted to do much of anything other than hang out in front of the TV and watch movies with some popcorn. Jonah loves popcorn more than anything. If we play a game and have popcorn at the same time, forget about it. His hand and mouth are in constant motion until that bowl is empty. If we want any, we better grab it while we can before the popcorn-monster swallows the bowl.

He reminds me of me when I was younger. I used to love popcorn too. I used to tell my mom that I had a popcorn-headache. Only popcorn would make it go away. More often than not we got the popcorn. It wasn't as easy as it is now... We had the old hot air popper that would blow the kernels around and shoot them out the top into the waiting bowl. The attached butter melter that would drip the golden deliciousness onto the kernels rarely did more than soak 1/3 of the kernels leaving the others dry. But we liked it just the same.

Our personal favorite is the crank style popcorn popper. This one is a small kettle with a lid that has a crank attached to a "beater" of sorts. This one makes great popcorn and you get to have a little exercise while you are making it. Ours has sinced passed on, so we'll have to obtain another one sometime in the future.

I'm not sure how I got from Sunday cleaning to the popcorn frenzy of our household, but here's a Calvin & Hobbes comic to bring us back to the original topic.