And the Winner is....

My house has been the cleanest it has ever been this last week. Aaron was inspired to create a new cleaning "game." Each of us started the week with 100 pennies. As the days went by, if I found something that someone did not put away, and I put it away, the I got to take one of their pennies. It took us a good week of deep cleaning, hanging pictures on my walls, and getting rid of our piles laying around, but we finally did it and the game started last Monday. The kids loved the game, and really got into it. The mornings used to be the hardest part of keeping their rooms clean. They were always in a hurry to get to school. But this week, they jumped out of bed, made their beds and then looked to see what they could find of someone else's. I got to where I was afraid to put anything down. Once I was in the middle of changing out the garbages and Samuel comes over, "I caught mom!" I had to ask him what he did. He said I hadn't put the garbage can away. I told him I was in the middle of the job and can't do it yet. This game has definitely made a change in my behavior!


After a week of hard work, and good policing skills Aaron and I counted the pennies. We will let the kids count next time, but we had to make sure that neither Aaron or I won this first time. The winner for the week was Samuel with 135 pennies, and that was without fudging the results! He beat me by 1 penny! Since Samuel won, he got a small heart shaped box of chocolates left over from Valentine's Day!! The rest of us got mini kit kat bars for playing...there had to be some kind of reward for playing right?! I have enough snacks for keeping this game up for 12 weeks, so hopefully we'll have some good habits down by then. My house wasn't ever disgustingly dirty...at least I didn't think so. It was just lived in. But oh, how much I loved this week!!! Maybe we'll finally get a house of order!