Last year was a tough year to make resolutions. After dealing with everything that happened in 2020, trying to come up with a resolution was just another task. Overwhelmed with 5 kids and recently finding out a 6th was on the way, I decided that I needed a break. I could no longer try to keep my ship (our house) steered in the perfect direction alone and instead I needed to sail a different course (sorry for all the nautical references)

My Frustration/Resolution

The biggest change I decided to make was to have more fun in the house, but honestly I had no idea how to do it. I am always the one telling the kids to clean up and always trying to keep everything tidy. I sometimes would get frustrated that I didn't have as much fun as everyone. So, I really wanted to set out on having more fun, but also, I couldn't let my household just go to shambles, I needed some serious help on the cleaning front.

Getting on the Right Path

My husband is great at trying to help out and knew I was frustrated, so one morning he came to me and claimed he had a genius idea. Let's make it fun for the kids to do chores. I thought to myself, we have teens, we can't trick them into doing chores by making a silly game, but it turns out you can, you just have to add one important twist that we didn't think of on our own.

The Breakthrough - Accidentally Getting the Kids Buy In

Every week, we decided our family was going to do chore challenges to figure out who did what chore. The games involved simple challenges like throwing a ping pong ball in a cup to miniature golfing, to ridiculous ones like playing mustache tv and trying to match a mustache to the actors face. The key to getting the kids buy-in actually came from one of my kids who said, why can't we win NO CHORES for the Week, in which we replied, "Yeah, why not" Once we said that the kids eyes lit up. So, included in every chore challnge is a chance to win no chores. It doesn't always happen, but the fact that they have a chance at winning no chores is a big deal. Then losing and getting a chore you would have got anyways is not that bad. The kids especially loved it when my husband and I participated.

The Family Chore Challenges snowballed into more family fun.

After a month or so of doing chore challenges, I noticed something different about our kids. They were always finding ways to play games together. Whether it is with a coconut they found when our car was stuck on the side of the road, or simply when bored at home. You could see they were always now finding ways to be entertained other than just looking down on their phones.

Personally, a huge weight was lifted

By letting go and deciding to have more fun with my kids a huge weight was lifted. The amount of help I get around the house is so much more than when I was just barking orders at everyone to help out plus I am enjoying playing all the silly games we come up with or find other families doing. It truly has been the best resolution I ever had, even though I had no idea how to accomplish it. Sometimes, you just have to put it out there to the world and somehow things sort of work out.

You can check out all our family challenges on our Tik Tok and Instagram.