Chore Chart, Line 2

I am a crafter by nature, coming from a long line of DYIers. My mom does arts & crafts as did her mom, while her dad was a house builder. My dad is a DYI-guy with a fair amount of kludger/plugger with Army ingenuity; his mom was always sewing or crocheting something for the church bazaar and his father, although a mining engineer, ran a bakery with his brothers during The Great Depression. We are always fixing things instead of just throwing them out & getting new. One of the first Girl Scout badges I earned required being able to sew on a button and use a sewing machine, something both of my parents worked with me on. If given a craft kit and a toy, I completed the craft kit first. Some of my favorite books as a child were "The Borrowers" series and Laura Ingalls Wilder's books; I was just amazed at their resourcefulness in reusing objects. (Which is why I had that dresser drawer full of junk anyways.)

It's no surprise that I have a pile of "projects" waiting for my attention. With two kids who play hard and are the glad recipients of hand-me downs, there's always a button or tear. They also have books that need taping, snugglies that need stitching and toys that need gluing. Our chairs and cabinets pop screws and nails. Nicknacks take dings, jewelry gets kid-handled.

There's much, much more that needs cobbling together then there was before kids. It's harder to get around to doing the repairs as well, since kids don't interact well with needles.... or Super Glue. It does pile up, as do the things I have on hand to make some more creative repairs.

Again, doing this is to cut down on clutter and whittle away at my procrastination. I'm also very proud or my abilities. I do good work. I've made a rolling laundry hamper out of an old round medical stand (it has great metal caster action that they just don't manufacture any more), "hotel-style" shower curtain rings, large grommets & a muslin canvas drop-cloth. I just stitched up the holes in the bottom of my son's old Iron Man backpack so my daughter can carry it, and you wouldn't know that the backpack didn't come as it is now configured. (Hey, it's shiny & it's a backpack like brother's. She wanted it for MMO and I wanted to save money.)

I like fixing things. But I like fixing them well, which means slowing down, making the space and making the time. Slowing down, making space, taking time, feeling good about a job well-done... aren't these the sorts of thing you find in self-help books. Getting that pile done, one or two things at a time, is working. Some things I can do while waiting for my "stupid computer games" to load. Other things take just a few moments, or are portable for when I have to sit around somewhere. So I can do this, and get my smiley star.

And if I ever get current with my fix-it pile, I can always change the line to "Work on a Craft"; I have a few crochet projects I've started but not finished and a sweater I'd like to knit!

Chore Chart, Line 1

Sometimes you have to start with the easiest & most obvious. It's that whole "taste of success" thing. As a stay-at-home-mom, obviously I'd clean something everyday. Ought to.

Yet sometimes I don't. Things like laundry seem almost Sisyphean. With the kids always curious about everything, especially the things out of sight/out of reach, it's often easier to pile things up in my room to put up later. I don't even want to think about the accumulation of dust on my furniture and the "whatever" on my floors. (To be honest, we're cat-people, but I'd almost get a dog just to eliminate frequent floor chores since that involves mostly the kids dropping food.) I kind of sound like a slob, don't I?

I'm not. I am a reformed "pig-pen" kind of kid. My mom still tells tales of finding dirty clothes under my bed and dirty dishes, too, when I was in elementary school. I remember having a dresser drawer just full of junk & rocks I'd find while I was walking. My desk at school was so full of jumbled papers, I'd lose my pencils & couldn't get my books to stay in. It was bad. But sometime around turning into a teenager, I saw the error of my ways. I could not find the stuff I wanted & needed. So I got neater. Everything had a place; but it was OK to make a put-away-later-pile. I just had to put things away before the pile fell over. People began to compliment me on my organizational skills. I got better in college with meeting the challenges of living in small, shared spaces. And packing everything I own into one car. (I'm good. I have the family packing gene.)

As a mom, I'm excellent, since our house is small. I often joke that I know where all the bodies are buried. But it's true, I know where just about everything is (except my keys & my glasses, but that's another story.) I might even be addicted to plastic storage containers. Yet....

Things get away from me. I have high-needs kids, that can interrupt and interfere with my efforts. I've been depressed, so I've been unmotivated. It's a vicious cycle. All the clutter & piles contribute to my depressed feelings; my depressed feelings leave me too lethargic to deal with the clutter & piles.

Which is why I topped the list with the most obvious "Clean Something." Most days it's the mundane thing like tackling the the laundry. Sometimes it is the Herculean thing like cleaning & reorganizing my son's room. Every now & then it is the odd-ball thing like cleaning off all the mildew spots that have grown on the back door from being cooked in high Southern humidity since the trees behind our house were plowed.

Just do something. Fight the static inertia. A body in motion will stay in motion until it is acted upon by an outside force. I do not want to let depression have that sort of force on me again.

Chore List

My son, as I mentioned, has Asperger's and ADHD, as well as being an elementary-age boy. Thus trying to get him to do anything can be a chore. To help him learn to help himself, we've set up a chore list with specific self-care tasks like "Eat All Your Lunch" and "Give Yourself a Good Bath." We are trying to motivate him to be a better & more independent person. If he does a task, he gets a small star; if he does a week's worth of that task, he gets a smiley star. For every increment of 8 smiley stars he gets (there's only 8 lines on the chart,) he gets a reward. He's allowed one "off day" for any task.

It's going pretty slowly.

But it seemed to me, that if I'm going to challenge him to be a better person here at the start of school, I should challenge myself to be a better person, too.

So I got myself a chore chart. Made myself a list of things I ought to do everyday, but am often unmotivated to do. Same rules for me, too, with stars, smiley stars, 8s and rewards.

After the same three weeks, I'm only one smiley star ahead of my son. Not that this is a competition.

When I started thinking about using my chore chart as a post, I realized that all these things are things I can do to help combat my depression. Well, new habits are just as hard to break in as old ones are to break out.