I've Got a Loverly Bunch of . . . . . . . Marbles

**POST EDIT:  Ha ha ha!! Sorry if you read this and my thoughts were not well strung together thanks to overworking on sewing easter dresses and distractions from children. I hope to have fixed it now.**

Yesterday morning around 4 am, shortly after giving Mirren the binky she lost while sleeping, I laid in bed trying to go back to sleep. (For some reason, when pregnant, if I get awoken I have the darndest time going back to sleep. I really hate it. That's another blog post entirely).

As I lay there, I had a thought pop into my mind about what I needed to blog about because I never had written about it. It's something we've been doing for over a year and I have found it an incredibly effective tool in getting the help I need around the house and motivating my kids to want to help without me having to get grumpy about it.

I originally got the idea from my sister Alyson, who shares lots of her good parenting ideas with me. Luckily she does the trial and error of what works and what doesn't for me!  She has been doing this with her kids for about 3 years I think with great success.

So here's the idea. We all need our kids to help keep our houses clean, whether it's from their own messes, the laundry, the dishes, the bathrooms, etc. Whatever you feel your children are capable of cleaning, here is their reward system! Using marbles as a way to mark how many jobs your child has accomplished, you put them into a jar/container until that child earns enough to earn a reward. What that reward is is up to you. Like my sister told me, rewards are not meant to be stingy things. This is something your child has worked long and hard to earn, so make it something worth all the work!!

 You store your childrens individual marbles in a container of some sort. Jar, rubbermaid container, whatever works for you. It needs to be a smallish/medium sized container.  I found my plastic container with lid at the dollar store. My sister also recommended letting my kids pick out stickers to decorate their work jars so they would each have their own unique container. I got my stickers at the dollar store too. They had a really good variety there and my kids loved picking out their own.  We went home and they decorated their own unique container. I forgot. I also bought my marbles and a big jar to hold them at the dollar store. Seriously, we're talking under $10 to get this thing set up. If you have jars and marbles already, it's even less. Within that first day, my kids were SO excited to start earning marbles! They were asking all the time, "what can we do to earn marbles?". It may help to make a list at first of what jobs there are for your kids to do, and how many marbles they will get for each job. I personally just have a pretty standard list of things my kids can help with at this point. My sister, whose kids are older, tries to keep a running list of unique jobs for each day and how many marbles they are worth for her kids and her kids pick which jobs they want. I'd say either way works, depending on the needs of your house and the abilities of your kids. We found after filling our containers the first time that we needed 95 marbles to fill ours. That sounds like a lot. And it is. But if your kids are working all the time and you are reminding them all the time to be earning, it should only take about 2 months to fill those jars, and lots of time to watch their marble jars grow and grow! By the way, I think my sisters jars are closer to 150 until they are full. So, every family's containers will probably be varying sizes. Just find what works for you!

  Some important things to think about:  I don't reward my kids for cleaning up things they messed up aka they got out all their toys and now need to clean them up. They made the mess, they need to clean it up. I give marbles for EXTRA jobs that they do, and that's just the rule at my house, jobs such as make their beds, empty the dishwasher, wash the mirrors in the bathroom, bring down sorted loads of dirty laundry to the laundry room, etc. Every house will have differences, according to whatever works in your house. I reward my kids with 2 marbles for every load of dirty laundry they bring downstairs to the laundry room. That might only be worth 1 marble at your house because it's not a big job, but my kids have to load it up off the floor (where I sort my dirty laundry) and haul it downstairs to the laundry room and I consider it enough of an effort that it's worth 2 marbles. I also give 2 marbles to them for emptying the dryer and taking the clean laundry to the couch to be folded. It's nice for me to not have to take out every load of clean laundry and my kids like to empty the dryer. I think it sometimes depends on how much a particular chore bugs you. Ha ha!!

One last tip: my kids and I started having some lax issues with kids feeling no motivation to earn marbles and I wasn't sure how to get them going again with it on their own. And then I realized I could kill 2 birds with one stone. I was sick of the tv being on too much, for my taste, at my house. It was PBS, but still, too too much. So I decided my kids had to earn so many marbles to even watch any movies or tv at my house, at all. It's different for each kid, dependent on their age and of course only for the big kids. Mirren will be joining in when she's 2.  This REALLY works for us! Most weeks the tv isn't even on until Thursday or Friday, woohoo!! AND my kids get a good number of marbles every week without really worrying about earning marbles, they are just thinking about getting tv time. Sure we have had 1 or 2 weeks where Aftyn says she just doesn't care about earning marbles but Bronwyn is a superstar and earns them as usual. So Bronwyn watches a movie and Aftyn has to go read books in her room. It happens and nobody fusses about it. Aftyn knows the rules and so does Bronwyn.

We love the marble reward system in our house!! I cannot say it enough. If you try it, don't give up on it if it doesn't work right away. Tweak it in the way that works for your family! My kids love knowing that they get a weekly reward of having tv/movie time AND knowing they are working toward a bigger reward and I love all the help that my kids give me in keeping our house clean and running! It's a win/win!!