Woodstone Prairie

Things are still very tricky here… M is having some good, calm days, but he’s also having lots of difficult, unsettled days. I’ve been trying to find a balance between keeping him connected to the community during this rough time, and keeping him close to home because he’s so unpredictable right now. It’s been a hard balance to find…

 I’ve turned the blog I started for the pdoc into a place more for me… a place to write more openly then I can here about the ups and downs of parenting M. It’s a good thing I think, especially during these rough days, and I’ve been writing a lot there. (Note to Loren, No I doubt I’ll ever write a book about my experiences raising M… I’m not a very good writer, and have almost no attention span, both are things that are probably prerequisites for writing a book. Hmm… maybe Steve will ghost write it for me?!)

 I’ve also been working on a project that my friend L and I came up with. L also has “complicated” kids and totally gets it in terms of how difficult even everyday things can be sometimes… everyday things like money.

M perseverates on money. He gets totally stuck asking for money, wanting to buy things, wanting to sell his things so he can buy other things… it’s been a loooooong term problem and one that has gotten extremely old.

Because of this intense perseveration on money he’s had much less experience with money than he should have… it’s been such a trigger for him that I often just avoid it completely.

So…. L (who has similar issues with her kids) and I worked together and came up with some very cool ideas for an allowance/money management kind of program, designed to teach not only some money skills, but also work on some daily living skills.  We used a lapbook type format to organize everything and it came together really nicely (if I do say so myself!).

Here’s how we did it… We made job cards and assigned each job a value (tokens that correspond to quarters), the tokens are collected through the week and traded for real money at the end of the week. The job cards  include a range of jobs, easy to hard, some physical, some academic, and on the back of each card is a step by step list for how to do each job (daily living skills!). We also included an “attitude” section where the kids can collect different tokens for attitude… helping without being asked, noticing things that need to be done and doing them, finishing what they start, etc. The attitude tokens can be used to buy the opportunity to pick a dessert for the family and make it themselves.  I stocked up on cake, pudding and brownie mixes, etc, easy things the kids can make pretty much on their own.  They are very excited about making dessert for everyone!

We put the whole works into a lapbook, here’s what it looks like…

These are the front pages where they’ll collect their tokens, on the inside front cover is a short paragraph about what a “good attitude” is. M has already earned one .75 (blue) token.

Here are the back pages with some “Rules for Wise Shopping” and “Money Waster” tips. I’m also putting their back statements back there…

… and the job chart (each pocket has a laminated card with the name of the job on one side, and directions for how to do it on the other side).

And here’s what my house looks like… it’s an absolute beehive of activity, kids doing jobs trying to make money.

R vacuuming…

M cleaning out the car…

They’ve already turned it into a competition of course, but they are limited to only a certain amount of money that can be earned each week so I guess the only real competition will be who fills up their money chart first.

 I wasn’t excited at first about using tokens… it’s something I’ve tried to stay away from after being burned in the past with M getting more and more focused on getting tokens until he was falling apart over some stupid little token thing I made up. I’m hoping that he’s old enough now to manage this kind of system better (and even if it only works for a couple of weeks, he will have learned to do some jobs he didn’t know how to do before).

I really like that it gives the control back to the kids… When M starts insisting he has to have money, there are plenty of ways for him to earn some… and the decision of what he’s going to do (and how much he’s going to earn) are up to him.

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We finally had our hay delivered the other day, so all the heavy work in the barn is done for awhile, thank goodness!

That’s me, one last sweep before the hay arrives… (the hay behind me is the last few bales of last year’s hay)

One side of the barn is empty, ready to be filled up…

It’s full now! I love having a barn full of hay, it’s such a very good feeling…

That’s all for now… it’s getting late and I’ve got lots to do before the kids get up!