Husbands and wives often argue over things like this. It’s said that usually the man won’t ask for directions. In my marriage, my dh never asks, but it’s usually because he can get pretty much anywhere without having to. I, on the other hand, can’t back out of my own driveway without getting lost. What about you? How is it in your family?
Last month I asked if you required your children to do chores. Seems a recent survey said that only 28% of people actually require their children to do chores. I wondered, if those families don’t require their children to help out, do they do the chores themselves or hire someone to do it?
Dusting is a chore I’d love to be able to pay someone to do FOR me, how about you? Not only is it no fun, but while your laundry basket may appear endless; dusting seems futile. No sooner do you finish than it seems you need to start again. If you dust under a ray of sunshine, you can actually see the dust smiling at you as it settles back down on the table you just finished.
I’m all for things that make life easier! I love those Swiffer Dusters because they are easy to use and the dust does seem to stick to it allowing you to get rid of more of the dust so less of it settles back down on your table. What about you?
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The Grape Grill Buddy Makes
Grilling Easier! Check it out!
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Has your family worked this chore out? Do your kids dust? Do you do it? Are you fortunate enough to be able to hire someone to do it for you? Do you take turns? Do you use anything that helps?
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I read an article that I posted on our fan page the other day. It shared a statistic about families I had a hard time believing.
“A 2014 national survey, conducted by Braun Research, found that 82 percent of parents said they were asked to do chores as children. But when they were asked if they required their children to do chores, only 28 percent of them said yes…A generational shift in how families raise their kids, in other words, appears to be turning even the most mundane of responsibilities, like doing the dishes, into unthinkable nuisances.”
Twenty Eight Percent?! I found that hard to believe. That would mean that the vast majority of families, not too far from almost all families, do not require their children to do chores!
My dh and I grew up doing chores around the house and we have required our children to do them too. We feel that each person living in our home should take some of the responsibility. We require our children, even when they were young, to contribute age-appropriate chores and tasks to the family each week. But we have found that, in doing so, our children have happily volunteered to help with even more than they were required to do.
We feel that requiring our children to do chores and contribute to the family helps ready them for life. It gives them life skills they’ll need as adults and an appreciation for others as well as a work ethic and a generous nature.
Did you grow up doing chores around the house? Do you require your children to do chores around YOUR house? How old are your children and what do you require them to do to help out around the house. And if you don’t require your children to do chores, who does them? Do you do them or do you hire someone to do them? And how do you feel not requiring children to do chores impacts the family?
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Welcome back to the GRAPE stuff that is our blog. This week has very special significance for us, the founders of Grape Stuff, LLC. Last month (on January 24th) we celebrated our 29th anniversary. Above is a picture of how we looked on our wedding day and next to it is a picture of us in 2012. So…we look a bit older now. lol
A little more than a month after our anniversary and the world celebrates Leap Year. Only one out of every four years is there a February 29th. It’s a special occasion as is a wedding anniversary. Our son pointed out that this special day is on the 29th and we had been married for 29 years. I hadn’t noticed that, but he brings a correlation between the two events that are true for all special events in our lives. Here’s what I mean.
Our 29th anniversary had us looking back at the many changes we’ve been through. Jobs, businesses, children, college goodbyes, and a daughter who started a marriage of her own this past year. Those anniversaries, birthdays and other special anniversary dates allow us to reflect on our families and how they’ve grown and changed.
If you are a Leap Year Baby, your celebrations are a bit different. Many Leap Year Babies will count only the years in which there actually was a February 29th (all in fun) and say they are only a quarter of the age they actually are. As I’m getting older, this doesn’t sound like a half bad idea! ROFL
My dh and I count our togetherness in a different way. We were dating five years before we got married so we have actually been together for 34 yrs. As I reflect on that, I realize we’ve made ourselves look a bit older doing it that way. Our Togetherness Gauge is actually the opposite of the Leap Year Baby Numbering System.
So…how many of you were born on Leap Year or know someone who was? How many of you were married on Leap Year? And while we are at it, how long have you been married?
Come share your anniversary and what insights you have come to by looking back at your life as the years have gone by. How have your children grown? Are they still living at home? Are you an Empty Nester yet? Soon? (Our son is our last child at home and he is a Junior in High School so there are precious few years left before he goes off to college.)
How about your family? Come share.
]]>We’ve got a brand new video for our Grape Grill Buddy featuring just as few of our 5 Star Reviews! Check it out and leave a comment at the bottom of this post with your thoughts!
Makes the perfect gift for his BBQ and her kitchen!
If you don’t already have a set of two Grape Grill Buddy BBQ Grill and Baking Mats, click here!
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Our sister company, Art of Eloquence, is offering an incredible Valentine’s Day Package that is perfect for families who’d like to improve their communication skills in order to share the the Gospel, deepen their faith and/or learn how to communicate difficult things in love and grace.
It’s an incredible package of two digital study materials, a bonus and a store-wide gift certificate! You can check it out by clicking this link, but hurry! It’s only good through Feb 15th!
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We’ve scoured the internet and polled our readers and customers asking what products families are most looking for. By far, most asked for easier access to the toys and games their children asked for most!
Parents are so busy these days with work, family obligations, housework, meals, and their children’s events that they often don’t have time to drive around from store to store to find the exact toy their child is asking for. Besides, the most popular toys and games are sold in limited supply at each location so the drive time and gas are often wasted anyway. Some families even said they had times when they had to settle for something less than what their children wanted because they just didn’t have the time or energy to find them at their local stores or malls.
Even on the internet/Amazon, it can be difficult to locate some of these most treasured childhood gems. So we have vowed to help by bringing you the quality toys and games your children know and love! As we find them, they will be added to our Amazon store so we may bring you easy access when you need a birthday or holiday gift or if you just want to give your son or daughter a special token of love “just because!”
However, as they are likely to go fast, we may have a short window to let you know about them. So…the best way for you to find out when we have a special toy or game your little one has been dreaming of, is to subscribe here to our blog! We will be posting each time we have an offering no matter the day of the week. These posts will be in addition to our regular informative and fun posts we offer each Tuesday.
To subscribe to our blog, check out the link on the top right=========>
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Have you seen our video yet? We’ll be doing more of them this year!
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Little children are inexperienced in communication, but as I will share, we can all learn some valuable communication lessons from them.
Lesson number one: Speak Plainly.
Adults say, “The honour of your presence is requested at the…blah blah blah…” Adults go to great lengths to use the right words, the perfect invitation and the most respectful language, but at the end of the day, it can often sound confusing, standoffish or pompous.
Children say, “Wanna come to my party?” Children put things simply, succinctly and honestly. They don’t worry about how it sounds. They just say what they mean and because they don’t know big fancy words, they don’t use them. Children don’t send mixed messages. They don’t use subtlety. They don’t mince words. They come right out and say what’s on their mind. It’s clear, bold and honest.
As adults, we do need to watch our tone and choose our words carefully, but we can all learn simplicity from our children. Winston Churchill said it best, “The short words are best, and the old words are best of all.”
Lesson Two: Listen Wide-Eyed.
Young children are notorious for their wide eyes as they soak up information. You may not think they are paying close attention, but they absorb almost everything around them. You know this because, if you aren’t careful, they repeat things you said that you wish you hadn’t.
We adults could learn a great deal from this trait. To a young child, everything is wondrous. When they ask a question, they don’t care whether that person is educated, important, powerful or well-respected. They expect an answer. They often don’t even much care if the answer is correct. How would they know otherwise?
I’m not saying we should take everything people say at face value or give credence to every Tom, Dick and Harry, but learning to listen with wonder as people talk is a skill we often lose. As we grow older, we think we know better, we have less time, less patience. We often only want to take the time and trouble to listen to people when we have to, when we really need something or when we really think they have something valuable to add.
Children give their undivided attention and soak in all the information they can comprehend. If we adults would only do that on a consistent basis, we would learn so much about each other that it would greatly increase our understanding of how best to communicate with others.
Lesson Three: Don’t let anyone distract you.
You may have noticed that little children are like a freight train barreling through anyone who dares to interrupt them or try to distract them from their goal. They will ask sixteen times in a row, if they have to, in order to obtain the cookie. I refer you to last Friday’s Communication Friday Funny where little Sophia, aged 2, wanted a lollipop.
As we grow older and wiser, we learn to become sensitive to other’s needs and this is a good thing, but we also learn to exchange our tenacity for fear and our sticktoitiveness for defeat. What we need to do is learn from our five year old examples and keep our eyes on the goal. Don’t give up our visions for comfort. Find a tactful and adult way to not let anyone distract us from our goals.
Lesson Four: Be Yourself!
Young children are who they are. They very rarely hide it. In fact, they don’t know they can and they don”t think they should. Adults learn that in order to be accepted, we need to conform. In order to be promoted, we may need to comply. In order to be effective, we may need to play the game. Let’s face it, if our kids did this, we’d call it pretend.
Adults often loose some of their sense of self as we play the game of life. We get away from what we want because of what we need. We move away from who we are in favor of who we think others need us to be.
When I was a kid, I was weird. “They” called me that. “They” is the popular kids. I moved around a lot as a kid and, since I was shy, it was hard to fit in anyway. However, being different (weird) made it that much more difficult. I was the one who didn’t have a history with them. I was the outsider. I was the one who said “dungarees” instead of “jeans.” I had a “pocket book” instead of a “purse.” I loved words and music not designer Sasoon labels (Okay, I just gave away my age there!) and I talked about justice and fairness while my peers talked about boys and beauty. I was the short one, the creative nerd.
Maybe you felt that way. Adults thought it was cute when I was young, but as I grew older, I found my peers didn’t agree. I tried to fit in. I tried not to be a weirdo. I didn’t try long because it just didn’t work and I was miserable being someone else.
So I learned very early in life what my daughter calls “Embracing Your Inner Weirdness.” And when I accepted Jesus, I realized that this is who God created me to be anyway.
Another lesson I learned after studying communication skills for many years is that, while children may want everyone to be the same, adults find that boring. Adults want to spend time with an individual, but by that time most of us have already spent too many years trying to be someone else. My advice to you is DON’T.
I’m five foot nuthin’, have an extremely goofy sense of humor, wear thick glasses, and love purple so much it’s the only color I wear. It’s me. It’s who I am and you know what? People remember me. They appreciate my creativity.
Don’t be like everyone else. God created you to be special. As you go about life trying to live as Christ would have you, also remember to be the person God crated you to be and not a carbon copy of someone else. He already created someone to be that guy!
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JoJo Tabares holds a degree in Speech Communication, but it is her humorous approach to communication skills which has made her a highly sought-after Christian speaker and writer. Her articles appear in homeschool publications, such as Homeschool Enrichment Magazine and The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, which also endorses her Say What You Mean curricula. You can also find JoJo on web sites such as Crosswalk.com and Dr.Laura.com. For more information on communication FUNdamentals and Christian-based communication skills for the whole family, please visit http://www.ArtofEloquence.com
What are your family’s New Year’s Resolutions? Do you do them as a family? Or just individually? I think it’s important to get your entire family on board with goals you have for the coming year. We’ve done that with ours for many years now. Even when it was something that really only affected the two of us (dh and me), we always sat the kids down and discussed it with them and asked them how they felt and if they had any questions, comments or even ideas for us. You’d be surprised how much great info can come from creative innocent minds.
This year it’s just our son and the two of us as our daughter is married now and living in another state. So we sat down and discussed what we plan for our business and personal life, church life and our extra curricular activities. For example, our son is a gamer and fairly good with a computer. He’ll be working on some videos for us this year. Some will be educational (recipes and ideas on how to use our products) and some will be purely for fun!
Are you planning to move this year? Working on a project in your home? Do you have a family business? A health issue that needs attention? How can you leverage the power of the family in order to meet your goals? How can you take advantage of the creative juices of your four year old daughter or the expertise of your 14 y/o techie son?
United we stand. A family that plans together is a force to be reckoned with! Please share your goals, dreams and how you plan to come together as a family to accomplish them in 2016!
By the way, this month’s newsletter article was a list of 52 ideas for spending family time without breaking the bank. No and low cost ideas you can do once a week with your family. You should subscribe! The newsletter is full of great info, ideas, freebies and fun for families. You should have access to the previous newsletter, but if not and you want it, just email me [email protected] and tell me the email address you subscribed with and I’ll forward it to you.
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