HOUSEHOLD RULES!

Raising children without any rules of the house, didn't seem like a good plan to me. Early on in my motherhood, I knew I had to be on top of the game, with 2 smart little girls to raise. Well let me clarify this a bit more (with 3 smart little girls around). Yes, we had a neighbor girl that was over at our house on a regular basis. She was a delight and very smart little girl. I knew that I had to be one step ahead of these three.

It's pretty easy to enforce rules on your own children, but an other's child, that was another story. We lived in a perfect neighborhood, however. It was an older neighborhood and younger children were few and far between. So it was easy to send my neighbor's child home if she didn't comply with our house rules. She was punished and so was my children punished by not getting to play together. When you have a neighborhood full of small children, this wouldn't work, since the child would go off and play with other children. In the summer months our neighbor girl would go off to the Country Club to swim about 3 or 4 in the afternoon. We didn't belong to the Country Club.

I did try to have set jobs for each child to accomplish during the day as they grew up. It was hard not to give our older daughter more difficult jobs, since she was older and bigger. To combat this problem, I would write the jobs that needed to be done that day down on paper and put them in a jar and they chose the jobs they had to do. That way, It was fair. Of course, I had to understand that their attempts to do a job would not pass an adults view of the finished product, but they were young and learning on a daily basis. Praise goes a long way to make a child feel like they did well.

It seemed like there were so much to learn in the world and these children had a lot ahead of them to learn. So I began early to try to teach them "life skills".

Television wasn't like it is today, so many bad programs and so many bad influences. On the whole, there were good TV programs to watch. However, one could allow TV to become a babysitter. Now this isn't good, even though they were watching good programs. I set a limit on their TV watching. So many hours a week they could watch, and they could select their viewing on what was coming up that week. They could save some viewing time for something they really wanted to watch the next night.

My goal was to raise my daughters to become Christian adults, with "life skills" that would never go out of style. Looking back on this, I am proud of our daughters love for God and their love to serve others. Did I make mistakes? Well, who doesn't? Through all my bungling and wrong calls on things, I feel that they saw "love". You can make a multitude of mistakes, but when they see love as the motive, you will succeed. When I failed, God would take over my feeble ways. Remember there wasn't an instruction book that came the day they were born. I really take that statement back, there was an instruction book, the Bible, that is infallible word of God and never fails.

Wisdom--The devils workshop is idol hands (or minds). Fill that time up with constructive, fun, educational, skills that will last a lifetime. This takes work and lots of planning to succeed in your goals.