tips for moms with 3+ kids

Mama… When? Mama… Why? Mama… Where? I’m not getting anything done, and the kids want to go outside to play. Especially my 7 year old daughter has a way of sticking around when I’m trying to get things done fast. She’ll invent a complete series of questions which naturally have to be answered with my full attention immediately. I’m a stay-at-home Mom and I practice home-schooling so I devote a good 75 percent of my day to my kids and their questions and I love to explain answers to them and teach them new things. BUT… there are those rare times during the day when I need 5 minutes to clean up the kitchen, brush my teeth, or maybe bake a fresh bread…. so here’s what I did.

Trying to combine the convenience of her leaving the room with a positive learning effect, I decided to just ask her for a favor. I asked her if she could maybe write down all her questions and later when I have time I promise to sit down with her and go through all the questions and answer them. She vanished faster and for a longer period of time than I had imagined and when she came back I was relaxed and had my work done. The whole experience put her in such a good mood and she was so excited that it kind of took me by surprise. I started reading her questions and was really impressed. She had some errors here and there and I asked her politely if I should correct them… this excited her even more and lead to more questions what I had corrected and why… she even told me to do it with a bright orange marker that she could read over it later. Must say everything went over pretty smooth and we were done in about 5 minutes…

A couple days later the idea kind a backfired - but not in too much of a negative way.  She started to get creative and instead of questions she came into the kitchen with a complete page of writing. She said, “Mama… this… you have to read… wait ’til you read this Mama… call me when you’ve read it!” and then she was gone again. Her tone of voice kinda sounded like she was up to something so I stopped everything I was doing, picked up the notebook and started reading. It was an exact description of everything her brothers and sisters were up to.  It read something like this… Zsolt said to Zyge ‘poop’ on the head… Zyge said to Zsolt ‘pee-pee’ on the head… Ginger is in the boys room… It was pretty hilarious because there was a complete page of what everyone had said and done upstairs for the last 5-10 minutes since I had left to work in the kitchen.

The cool thing was that her punctuation wasn’t lacking much (it was actually pretty good!) when writing what everyone had said, so it seemed to be a good time to teach her how to use and apply quotes properly (he said, “….”  and she said, “….”.) It must have made a big impression on her because since then she’s been writing and illustrating her own little stories Five little cats playing on the deck The positive outcome resulted in her not getting so angry and aggressive with her siblings as often. She just writes down what happened instead of trying to discipline them which she always tries but usually fails to do out of frustration and just starts screaming at them all… she is now getting to be a really skilled writer and this phase is pretty much long gone… she doesn’t have enough time because she’s a writer and illustrater now! She’s motivated all her brothers and sisters to write stories as well but I think this might take awhile… but maybe her sister Ginger will follow in her footsteps next year? and then Zsolt? Zygmunt? London? and last but definitely not least Lyme? Oh wow do I have a lot of work ahead of me…. HELP!!! (just kidding - love it!)