One week to go!

You may not have realized it, but in a week March will be over. It will be April. April 1, to be exact. April Fools Day! It's time to start preparing, people. There are a lot of websites out there with pranks you can play on your kids. I'm beginning my search for some new ones tomorrow! But I thought I would share some of the past pranks from the House of Payne, just in case you need a little motivation. If you have a good one, post it in a comment. I'd love to hear it!

• The ol' kitchen sprayer prank: If you have one of those sprayers on your kitchen sink that is operated by a lever, place a rubber band around it, holding the lever down. Then sit back and wait for someone to turn on the faucet. I got Haley with that one year. Good one!
• Switcheroo's : Kids sleep pretty deeply and you can move them while they're sleeping so they wake up in their brother's bed, under their own bed, or in some location other than where they fell asleep. It was great when Alec, then 8, woke up in Landon's crib. LOL! If you have a little girl who sleeps in a nightgown and also have a baby in size 5 or 6 diapers (or even pull-ups would work), put a diaper on the older daughter while she's asleep. She'll wake up wondering how she got switched back to diapers. I have also switched cereals from box to box and switched the kids' clothes to another kid's dresser drawers. You can switch their shoelaces to lace toward and tie at the toe of the shoes. The list of switcheroos is limitless!
• Hey, that's not what I thought it was!: Once I made Jell-O in the Kool Aid pitcher. When the kids went to pour a cup of Kool Aid, nothing would come out. Once I made dinner out of candy. They REALLY liked it when the peas were really chewy fruit candy and the mashed potatoes were really ice cream. That was a bad plan, though. The ice cream started melting on the plates and the jig was up pretty fast. Too bad my kids don't eat gravy or they would have gotten caramel sauce on their "mashed potatoes" like I did!
• Piddle Puddle: A classic. Put clear plastic wrap over the toilet bowl, but under the lid. If you get it on nice and tight, the unsuspecting victim won't see it. If it works, it will make a mess, but I would think it would be hilarious. Unfortunately it didn't work in the House. Alec was not an unsuspecting victim. He was very suspicious that April 1 and was on the lookout for my pranks. He saw the plastic wrap, and I was busted.
• Drive bye-bye: This was one of my favorites. The kids knew we were going to play pranks on them, so they waited all day, suspicious of our every move. Nothing happened all day. The morning went by uneventfully. The afternoon was spent at a carnival at their school. On the way home the car started acting up. It was kind of jerking, almost as if someone was abruptly hitting the brakes. Then it just coasted to a stop. We ran out of gas! Unbelievable! Fortunately, we were already in our neighborhood. Roger got out with the kids to walk home and get the gas can in the garage. When they got several yards up the road, I started the car back up and sped past them yelling, "APRIL FOOLS!" out the window. Then I had to run into the house and lock them out because they were coming after me with vengeance!

I'll have to ask my kids what has been the most memorable prank for them. I have been messing with them for so many years that I can't even remember everything I have done to them. Poor kids....they are going to be so messed up. Let me know what you do to your kids. I need some fresh ideas!

The Chore Chart!!

It's finally here! The long-awaited chore chart post! A couple of people have been asking me to post this, so here it is. You'll never believe this, but over the last, oh, 7 or so years, many moms I have known have been uber impressed that my kids do chores. Crazy, huh? I thought all kids did chores. Silly me. Here in the House, we are firm believers in giving responsibilities to the kids. Not only that, but let's be real - there is no way this many people can live in one house and the kids not have responsibilities. We start them doing chores on a regular basis somewhere around 3.5 to 4 years old. At that age they like helping and they are able to help without making more work for everyone else. Contrast that with the exuberant 2.5 year old who wants desperately to "help." Now that Landon is 4, he is finally a part of the chore chart. He has been for quite some time, actually! And the chart I'm posting here is an old one. He now has a couple of other small jobs listed in his little row on the chart.

Our chore chart has gone through several evolutions over the years. Sometimes this is due to the kids needing a change to keep them motivated, and sometimes they just outgrow their assigned chores. Right now we are in a really good place with our chore chart. And it's pretty, too! But the best thing about it is that there are quite a few jobs around here that most of them can do without help, so our current chart rotates all the chores so the kids don't have to do the same thing all the time. There are 4 different jobs each day that the 4 oldest kids do. They all have something they really don't like doing, but with this chart, they don't have to do that chore very frequently. Over the last 6 months it has worked really well for us. Here's what the chart looks like:

It's a beauty, huh? At the beginning of every month, I print a weekly calendar for each week of the month. Then I take MY markers out of the cabinet and transform it into that thing of beauty. Then I get really excited as I fill in the chores. First things first - the job of cleaning the ferret cage. Those little critters stink to high heaven just by virtue of being ferrets. Add that to the fact that they poop their own body weight every single day, and you have one stinky mess every single day. Sunday is our chore-free day, but cleaning the ferret cage is the one job that absolutely must be done, no question, even on Sunday. They do this in pairs so that the smaller ones can help, but don't have to do the whole thing themselves. They couldn't do it themselves anyway. I also Febreeze Haley's room (where the u-reeka, u-stinka creatures live) at least once a week.

The next jobs on the chart are the Monday, Wednesday, Friday jobs. If I had my way, every square inch of carpet in the House would be vacuumed every single day. That is a tad unreasonable at this point in our lives. I used to vacuum every day when we had a smaller house and 3 kids. Now I have more space and less time to vacuum it. So I handed some of the vacuuming off to the kids. They are responsible for the rugs downstairs (there are 3 of them), the stairs, and the cabinet where we keep our cats' litter box. I love my kitties, even though they throw their litter around when they dig in the box. Since one of the cats belongs to the kids, they have to vacuum the litter box cabinet. They don't feed the cats or scoop the box, but they do have to do something for their cat, so this is it. The other M-W-F job is sweeping the wood floors downstairs. On Mondays, I clean the wood floors myself, so that job is replaced with vacuuming the living room furniture. Those jobs rotate so that everybody does 3 of the 4 every week.

Tuesday and Saturday are filled in next. They are the dusting days. The kids dust 4 rooms - the living room, the dining room, the playroom, and the guest room. And again, this is a rotating job, so they each do 2 of those rooms every week. The next week they will do the other 2. Erin is not a particularly good duster even though this is an easy job. She is just not very thorough, which she isn't with most of her chores...Lord help the man she marries. At least until she has kids. She will be very well trained in making chore charts!

Thursday's jobs are pretty involved. Well, except one of them. They have to sweep the front porch and walkway. That's the cream puff job they wait a whole month to get on Thursdays. Whoever isn't lucky enough to get that one may end up cleaning a bathroom. The kids clean 2 of the 3 bathrooms in the House. The downstairs one is small, so it's pretty quick. The upstairs one is the kids' bathroom, and it has more counter space, 2 sinks (that usually have toothpaste in them - ICK!!), and 2 mirrors. The kids have to clean the toilet inside and out, wipe down the counters and sinks with Clorox wipes, and clean the mirrors. I don't make them do tubs or floors. I would have to do those again after they, so I just go ahead and do them myself. If they escape the bathroom chores, but don't get the sweeping the porch chore, they have to take out the trash. Friday is trash collection day, so they have to take out ALL the trash in the House on Thursday. Then they have to haul the Herbie Curbie down to the road and bring the recycling down as well.

Finally, I remind them all at the bottom of the chart that everyone must pick up their room, put away any laundry that is in their cubby in the laundry room, and check the basket on the stairs for homeless items that I have picked up during the day. They also get another gentle reminder. The chore chart is posted on the refrigerator with one of my favorite magnets, which addresses anyone who may question why they have to do all these jobs.....

Happy St. Paddy's!

So, after a month-long (and then some) hiatus, the House of Payne has once again reopened its doors. Glad you stopped by. Now you can see what we did for St. Patrick's Day!

We are sure there is a leprechaun somewhere in the House. Every March 17th our toilet water turns green, our milk turns green, or something else really weird (and green) happens. So this year we decided to try to catch the little bugger. A few days ahead of time, we started planning how to build a trap. The kids came up with the idea to use a tall box as the trap so that the leprechaun couldn't climb out once we had him ensnared. Alec and Carrie rigged the trap with yarn that went out the bottom of the box, back in the box about halfway up, then was tied to the flaps at the top.

Everyone knows leprechauns love gold, so we used gold coins as bait.

The yellow ball? I have no idea..... Don't ask me what it was for.

The bag of coins was tied to the yarn at the bottom of the box. When it was lifted, the trap would be sprung and the flaps would close on the top of the box, trapping the leprechaun. Pretty good thinking! And look in there. It would be a pretty steep climb for a tiny leprechaun to get back up to the top of the box. I don't think it's gonna happen. I think our chances of catching him are pretty good!

We set up the trap, decorated the outside of the box, and set a little ladder next to it so the tiny trickster could get in. Then we went to bed dreaming of what we were going to do with all the gold the leprechaun would have to give us after we caught him.

They look really confident, don't they? And when they got up this morning, they were 100% sure he was in there. Alec was totally freaked out. Carrie told him the trap had been thrown - the flaps were closed! He ran downstairs and picked up the box which started rattling with movement from inside! Man, you never saw a 10 year old boy run so fast in your life! It scared the Blarney out of him! He came running, no, flying, no, he practically teleported himself back upstairs to interrupt my shower and tell me the leprechaun was in the trap. After I was clean, dressed, and dry, I insisted they wait to open it until I could get the camera. I wanted pictoral proof of what we had accomplished!

So, the box is slowly opened and we see what was moving around inside when Alec picked it up....

Blast! He tricked us! That little stinker got away! But he left a bag of goodies for each kid. This one was tied to the yarn where our gold coins had been! That was what was holding the flaps on the top of the box closed fooling the kids into believing they had trapped the leprechaun.

They don't look so happy now, do they? Slightly disappointed, I'd say. I can't quite figure out how anyone could be disappointed with jelly beans and creme de menthe Hershey's Kisses. I guess they were expecting gold??? Mabye it was the jeering note the leprechaun left that said, "Can't catch me!" in green ink.

Oh well....we have already begun brainstorming ways to improve upon our trap for next year. Now that we know the leprechaun is really here and that he can be lured into a trap fairly easily, we just have to get the trap right. He's pretty slick, but I think we can get him. Maybe next year we'll get the gold.

We're back!

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