I hear the phrase, "I do not know how you do it." so often when it comes to raising the boys. I honestly do not know how I do it some times too. I try to do my best, forgive myself for my mistakes and forge ahead. There are nights I get so little sleep, I wonder how I am going to survive the day. Diabetes and illness come up out of the blue, and I am forced to change plans or accommodate my plans to meet everyone's needs.
I think the best answer to how I make things work is how I run the house. I believe in teamwork. Everyone has a job to do in the house and there are consequences if the job has not been done. In the first few months of single parenting, I had a hard time convincing my second oldest son that he needed to work as part of a team and that being in a family means that he is part of a team. He and I had many heated discussions where I would repeat myself about how much work I do to keep him housed, clothed, fed and healthy, and that helping me with chores around the house is not an inappropriate thing for me to be asking of him. It took several months of him helping out and then deciding to go on strike before he started to do the chores without complaint. His brothers also assisted me in convincing their brother that he needed to pitch in.
One chore he does not complain about is cooking. He loves to cook and he is our budding chef in the family. As the kids have aged, they all are starting to make meals or cooking part of a meal. There are times that H or A will cook the entire meal. They enjoy the feeling of accomplishment. I enjoy that sometimes they get a taste of their own medicine when their brothers do not want to eat what was made. That has happened less and less as everyone has gotten older.
I tell strangers to our family that I am the starter and that the kids are the finishers. I start the laundry and cycle it through both machines. The kids will switch off who folds and puts the clean clothes away. I load the dishwasher and one of them empties it for me. We are all supposed to make our own beds and clean our own rooms. I make Sundays our chore day. I make a list and we split it amongst ourselves to complete the chores that much faster.
We have many family meetings to discuss grievances and new ideas to solve our problems. I also praise what has been going right and what has gotten better. We use the remote control as our talking stick. No one can talk unless they have the remote. There were too many interruptions during the meetings for us to not have a talking stick.
Teamwork seems to be the answer in my house to keep the chaos to a minimum. Enlisting the kids in helping me out as much as possible was the best thing I could have done for this family.
I understand that I did not mention how teamwork helps to manage the diabetes within the family. I am going to write about that next week in "Managing the Chaos."
