All things Cadence (with a little Finn thrown in)

It's amazing how obsessed you become with taking pictures, everywhere you go, once you start a blog. I think Brad and the kids are going to start boycotting our outings if I keep this up. In the meantime, they are being good sports.

So I subscribe to a great magazine, "Family Fun", and they had this awesome idea for getting your kids to do chores. It was geared more towards older children, but I decided to try out with Cadence because I feel she is old enough to help out with things around the house. We've been doing it about a week and so far it is working well. The point of it is to encourage your children to help out with household chores on their own, as they see things needing to be done (i.e. doing the dishes when the sink is full; taking out the trash when the garbage is full; etc.). Of course, Cadence is still too young to do those tasks, but I was surprised at how many chores I was able to come up with that she is capable of doing. So I made a picture chart with her level of chores and if she does one of the chores she tells me and then she gets the assigned number of marbles for that task. She puts the marbles in her jar and once the jar is full, she gets a prize. I'm liking this system so far because Cadence gets to choose whether or not she wants to do her chore, there's no penalty for not doing it, and I am not harping on her to do these things (saving myself stress). Of course, if she chooses not to pick up her toys or whatever, I have to do it. But my hope in all this is that as she gets older she will want to do more and eventually learn to help out the family. Once Finn and Aria are old enough, they will get jars too. Then, rather than having assigned chores, we will just have a chore list with a marble value for each task, and whoever does the chore gets the marbles. Obviously, if one of the kids is more motivated than the others he or she will end up getting more prizes as they fill their jar faster. I must admit, I really enjoyed putting the chart together. I did a picture chart so that Cadence can look at it and be able to tell what the chore is by herself. Can you tell what her chores are by looking at the pictures?

These next pictures are just of my wounded children. Cadence and Finn were running around Brad's car out front while he watered the grass and Cadence tripped over the hose, skinning her elbow and cheek. Finn saw me taking a picture of Cadence's elbow and he wanted one too, so he

held his arm out for me to take a picture of. It's kind of hard to see in the picture, but Finn has a bruise on his left eyelid. He was walking around with his blanket on his head, as he often does, and ran into a wall and then the door. He just keeps on smiling. I think his head is numb from hitting it so much that he doesn't feel pain anymore.:) Cadence took this picture of me and I decided to post it so that you could see how I look most days...tired.