I’ve taken on the daunting task of cleaning and reorganizing our basement storage room this week. It doesn’t happen very often and when it does, I’m always reminded how abundantly blessed we are. There are so many families in this world who live in less space than that 180 square foot storage room and who, even in their wildest dreams, couldn’t imagine owning enough stuff to fill it!
While I was down there this evening sorting through everything from gift wrap to sleeping bags and luggage, I was thinking that it was time to write another blog post and wondering what it should be about. Suddenly, there it was… the job jar! Why in the world had I ever kept that thing? Obviously, it must have been so that I could blog about it! My kids are definitely going to roll their eyes when they see this one!
The job jar came into existence in 1992. That spring, Matthew was 12, Melaina 8 and Nathan 7. Though being a mom was always my first priority, I’d been back in the classroom teaching approximately half time for the three years since Nathan had entered kindergarten. As plans were being made for the following school year, I was offered a significant increase in teaching time. If I accepted, I’d be working almost full time. When I thought about all the lesson planning, marking and reporting that would be involved, I wasn’t sure how I’d balance that with the demands of a busy family. Richard and I talked it over, decided that I should accept the position and then called a family meeting.
Family meetings weren’t part of our normal routine so the kids knew that something big was up. We gave them a choice. Since I wasn’t going to have time to do everything that I’d been doing around the house, we could either spend some of the extra money that I’d be earning to hire a housekeeper or we could all chip in and do the housework together, save the money and spend it on a trip to Disneyland the following summer. The vote was unanimous; Disneyland, of course!
We decided that we’d clean house every Saturday morning. The next question was how to divide the labour to ensure that everything got done reasonably well and that no one got stuck doing the same mundane tasks week after week. The job jar was Nathan’s idea. Even at seven, he was a creative thinker and a problem solver. Put the jobs you want us to do in a jar, he suggested, and we’ll do whichever ones we pull out.
That’s exactly what we did. Since there were five of us, ten jobs went into the jar; five easier ones and five more challenging ones. Every Saturday morning, everyone pulled one from each category out of the jar and got to work. The only rule was that the chores had to be completed by noon. Of course there were times when we had to make exceptions because someone had hockey or another activity that morning.
For the system to work, Richard and I also had to be willing to adjust our standards. We didn’t put up with sloppy work but obviously we couldn’t expect a 7 or 8 year old to do the same job we might do. If the bathroom didn’t get cleaned quite as thoroughly when it was a child’s turn, that was okay. The next time one of us might pull that job. An added benefit was the fact that all three of our children learned how to keep house at an early age!
So what were the jobs that went into the old Mason jar? The easier jobs included
- Dust the livingroom
- Clean the small bathroom (actually a half bathroom)
- Tidy the basement playroom and empty the garbage cans
- Wipe the walls in the porch, kitchen, livingroom, hall and bathrooms (just fingerprints and scuff marks)
- Wash the breakfast dishes
- Vacuum the livingroom, hall and bedrooms
- Clean the main bathroom
- Tidy the porch and sweep the kitchen, porch and stairs
- Wash the kitchen floor, the porch and the stairs
- Sweep and wash the bathroom floors
Things went smoothly and there were very few complaints until one point when we all began to notice that Melaina, an early riser, was doing the same jobs every Saturday. At first, we were proud of her for getting up and getting starting on her chores while the rest of us were still rubbing the sleep out of our eyes but we weren’t quite so happy when we realized that she was going through the job jar and picking out the chores she liked best! All in all, though, the venture was a huge success.
The summer of 1993 became much more than just a trip to Disneyland. We started by driving out to Vancouver for my brother’s wedding on the 3rd of July. Following that, a six week road trip with the tent trailer in tow took us down the Pacific coast all the way to San Diego where we made a day trip across the Mexican border to Tijuana, then across the desert to Pheonix, Arizona, north to the Grand Canyon, and eventually all the way back to Alberta. In addition to Disneyland, we toured Universal Studios and the San Diego zoo, walked the streets of Hollywood and the beaches of the Oregon Coast, hiked the red rock canyons of Utah and experienced so much more!
And what happened to the job jar when the journey was done? By that time, it had become such a part of our family routine that regardless of how many hours I taught it continued in use until the kids left home! Only then did it find it’s way to the storage room shelf!
Following Augustine 