Dare I say: progress?

The back to school craziness is in full swing here at the Morgans.  Here's the calendar I spent 2 hours figuring out the other night:

I was pretty proud of myself for putting that together--I'm just hoping I still have the gumption to do it when October comes around...I cannot tell you the number of school years I started a calendar like this and got one or two months into it and then gave up because it was too overwhelming and then I ran all over the place like a chicken with it's head cut off trying to remember which kid I put where that day...(thank heaven's for smart phones because at least now I can set an alarm.  When I remember to take my phone off of silent--which isn't as often as I should.)

Another one of my main goals in starting this blogging adventure was to improve my children's resilience and self reliance and frankly, to improve mine as well.  I've been thinking a lot these last six months on how we raise happy, capable, hard working kids and I'd like to tell you I have the magic answer but I don't.  Because I don't think there is one.  Kids come with their own personalities, strengths, and flaws and that's the way it's supposed to be and for us to expect that just because what works for one will work for another is naive.  And I was naive.  I remember that as we continued to have boys thinking, "well at least I'll know what I'm doing."  Riiiiiight...and then came Kennedy and when she was born I actually looked at the doctor and asked if there was an instruction manual in there as well.  (Note:  there was not.)  However, we are managing to make some progress here at the Morgans.  (I hesitate to even say that because I'm afraid Karma might come back to bite me but what's life without taking chances?)

The one thing that has become apparent to me is that we MUST allow our kids to do hard things.  I love this:

We were discussing this with our kids last week for family night and one of them said that we need to find an uncle with a farm so they can spend summers there to learn the value of hard work.  No farmer uncle to be had here but we do have a cool Disney roller coaster building uncle!  (Does test driving roller coasters count as work?)  So while we may not have a beet farm to send our kids to we have started giving them some more responsibility.  Here are some examples:

Example #1--Laundry:  I blogged about this previously.  With all these kids there is always laundry to be done and while I was actually pretty decent at keeping up on it I really wanted the kids to know how to do it.  The older ones had been doing their own for a while but we now have ALL the kids doing their own--and they are doing a great job!  An added bonus of this is that I am finding that their rooms are staying cleaner with them in charge of their own laundry.   How, you ask?  Because after 20 years I finally figured out that if I gave EACH of them their own hamper in their rooms that clothes ended up in them!  Previously we had two hampers in the hall for whites and darks but I guess it was just way too much to walk the 8 feet out into the hall to put their clothes in them...(I know--this seems like a no-brainer but after six kids I think it's painfully clear I have no brain left.)

Example #2--there is no example #2.  When I sat down to write this post I really thought that I would at least have another example but apparently I don't.  Dang it!  But I'm not going to get discouraged because one example is better than no example!  Right?  RIGHT?????