#RABlog Week: Post No.1 Visiting the vampires

Today's prompt:

A day (or an hour) in your life. Pick a day, an hour, or half a day, and tell us what happens.

A day (or an hour) in your life – Pick a day, an hour or half a day and tell us what happens? Are you stiff when you get up in the morning? Tell us about getting ready to go somewhere, or going to a restaurant. Pick any unit of time and tell us what your life consists of. - See more at: http://www.radiabetes.com/prescription-day/#sthash.aSX5Jaj5.dpuf

Pick a day, an hour or half a day and tell us what happens? Are you stiff when you get up in the morning? Tell us about getting ready to go somewhere, or going to a restaurant. Pick any unit of time and tell us what your life consists of. - See more at: http://www.radiabetes.com/leading-prompts-for-rablog-week-as-of-august-18-2015/#sthash.BQDphCW4.dpuf

A day (or an hour) in your life – Pick a day, an hour or half a day and tell us what happens? Are you stiff when you get up in the morning? Tell us about getting ready to go somewhere, or going to a restaurant. Pick any unit of time and tell us what your life consists of. - See more at: http://www.radiabetes.com/prescription-day/#sthash.aSX5Jaj5.dpuf

One of the joys (?!) of RA would have to be the drugs... They're none of them nice. Most have potentially nasty side effects, both short and long term. Many of them require close monitoring in the form of regular blood tests to ensure that there's nothing nasty happening with liver levels, and that the RA markers are behaving themselves. I have mine on a Monday morning, the day before I start a new box of Orencia - my injectable biologic drug that comes in a pack of four syringes. 

So, here's the thing. I'm phobic about needles. No-one LIKES needles. But I'm seriously phobic. For twenty three years I've been trying to tell myself that for someone who's been stuck as many times as I have, I should be over it by now...but I'm not. So, there is quite a routine for my blood tests, which is part of how I manage the phobic stuff. Managing self injecting for the biologic is a whole other story...

I'm usually up some time between 6am and 7am every morning - if I've had a reasonable night. I used to be a morning person, but that's changed a lot. I head downstairs, accompanied by yelling Siamese busily informing me that they're in danger of imminent starvation AND a bladder burst, so PLEASE open the door quick smart so we can go out, and have breakfast ready for when we come back in... I can be pretty unsteady first thing, and pretty vague, so two of them winding around my ankles is distinctly hazardous. I've got the auto-pilot kettle on, toast in, dish up mince for the cats, and dole out morning meds thing down pat now, so that all happens while I'm trying to connect brain cells to limbs and trying to convince my fingers that holding on to the teaspoon so the sugar goes in the mug rather than all over the bench is a good idea...I've had some mornings when the sugar has gone in the teapot and the tea into the mug...and I've not discovered that til I've poured it...! We have a sunroom with a couch which has become my morning spot so when my tea and toast are ready I head there with my book and park until the morning meds are starting to kick. 

The cats pop in and out, and usually end up deciding to settle on my lap around the time I'm needing to get up and shower - because one of the key things I have to manage on bloods day is to head out reasonably early so I can park easily.  I need to factor in recovery time after the shower - who knew something that's supposedly refreshing could be so exhausting...?...which on a bad morning, it really can be. 

I have my bloods done at my GP's surgery, which makes it nice and simple. Once I get to the shopping centre near where they are, I do the carpark thing - another auto-pilot feat - and then make my way up to ground level (Sydney is full of underground carparks due to the lack of space to do anything else) and across to the surgery. Usually I don't have to wait long, and that's a good thing. The longer I have to wait, the tenser I get about the needle. Currently, the tech is a little Asian girl who is very gentle. She chats to distract me, and last time, for the first time, remembered to use cotton wool and tape without me having to remind her that I'm allergic to bandaids. 

Then I'm free for another four weeks. I have a favourite coffee place in the shopping centre - someone said to me a while ago that when you have to have something done - bloods, scans, appointments, etc, - treat yourself to something afterwards. It gives me something to look forward to, and it offers me some resting time before I have to head home again. 

I used to be able to duck in for my bloods on the way to work. Having been medically retired two years ago, it's now a separate trip, and one that, some days, can take most of a morning. It depends on so many variables - what the traffic is like, how long I have to wait at the surgery, and how I am that particular day...on a bad day, it can be a couple of hours before I'm able to do the drive there, which means more effort once I'm there and a bigger coffee and longer sit before driving back, and then I crash for the rest of the day. Other days, I might be doing much better and I can be there and back in a couple of hours, and I can do something else in the afternoon.

Needles suck - that's all I can say. I've given up trying to tell myself I'll be OK with them, because I never am. Sticking to my routine on the morning I have them done is partly so that there's a kind of inevitable sequence of things that I can't question - they just happen. If I start to think about it, I start to stress about the needle. But the coffee and rock bun afterwards are always good, so that's something! 

Rheumatoid Arthritis blog event

Regular readers will possibly remember a post I wrote a few weeks ago about becoming a blogger for Creaky Joints - you can read it HERE. It was something I thought about for some time, as this ISN'T a blog about rheumatoid arthritis (RA). I just happen to be a blogger who has RA - as opposed to being an RA blogger (things get a little bit crazy in the blogger world...). 

However, the name of this blog can be attributed in some part to me having RA, because part of why I was such an old-school mum was because I needed for everyone in the household to pitch in and do their bit - especially if I was flaring. No.1 dumped the name on me by telling people he'd been brought up by a dragon...so I figured what the hell, I'll own it! Parenting when you're healthy is a tough job. Parenting when you're not can feel like an impossible challenge some days. I wrote a post about that too, and it was the first time I brought RA to this blog specifically. You can read that post HERE.

I got an amazing response to that post. I wasn't expecting that. But one thing I've learned since I started blogging is that you can never predict which posts will take off and which ones will drop like a stone! It was due to the response I got that the whole Creaky Joints thing happened. I was a member there anyway, and I know the other Australian blogger there - Arthritic Chick. She's been enormously supportive, and convinced me to go ahead with the Creaky Joints opportunity. You can read my posts for Creaky Joints HERE. 

NOW, there's another opportunity... 

Get used to seeing this image... Along with Arthritic Chick, I signed up to participate in this event. All of next week, I will be posting on an RA related topic every day...there are a whole group of us, from all over the world, so it will be a range of takes on the subject prompts we've been given.

I'm already feeling a little bit like I may have bitten off a bit more than I can chew, but I'll see how I go. My current emotional state aside, I'm reasonably OK at the moment, and I don't have a big workload either, so I figured that a project might be a good way to get me focused on something other than grieving Lizzie. 

For those who don't know exactly what RA is, I'll refer you back to the post I wrote about being a Creaky Joints blogger - there's a brief description there... This project will expand on that considerably - offering insights about what living with this chronic, incurable disease is like. Comments welcome here or on the Dragon Mother Facebook page. 

On grieving...

I heard the beginning of Margaret Throsby's interview on ABC Classic FM on the car radio a little earlier today. Her guest, Dr Gillian Trigg, chose the beginning of the first movement of Elgar's cello concerto with Jacqueline du Pre playing to kick off the program. It's one of my favourite pieces of music, particularly with du Pre playing. When asked why she'd chosen that piece, Dr Trigg said that it reminded her, born in England, of things English, but also she so loved the way du Pre played. She spoke about the tragedy of du Pre's early death from MS, and made a comment about the saying 'favourites of the gods die young'. There are SO many variants on that saying - it crops up in literature all the time. At this time in my life, of course, it resonates strongly. My friend Lizzie was only 53. So, yet another trigger for the floods of tears that are beginning to be a regular feature of my days as the reality of her death really starts to hit now that the funeral is over and I'm back home.

Grief is a strange beast. Many people have tried to analyse it, work out some kind of formula that those of us who grieve can work to so we can possibly see an end... After my mother died, I found myself having moments of absolute fury in response to many of the platitudes well meaning folk voiced, obviously in an effort to encourage me to 'move on' and 'get over' my mother's sudden death. My experience was showing me very clearly that there was no straightforward journey when grieving a loved one. Certainly, the model that posits a series of defined stages that you move through until you reach the end and are done - presumably to then just pick up the pieces and go on with life again - made absolutely no sense to me at all. 

What I found was that the loss of my mother had a way, after the initial few months while it was still just so raw, of sneaking up behind me and biting hard at the most unpredictable moments. I could be having a perfectly normal conversation with someone, and I'd suddenly be overwhelmed by a huge lump in my throat, a wobbly voice and the tears, once more, running down my face. It still happens...twelve years on. 

I managed last week, a week that included my birthday and all of DD's well laid plans to celebrate, to get through the days after Lizzie's death with lots of memories of the good times we'd shared over so many years. The conversations, the discussions, the sharing of our children's lives, and so on...sharing them with DD, who'd only met her once. I planned my trip interstate for her funeral, accompanied by phone messages with another of my good friends who was also travelling there, making arrangements... He and a third friend picked me up on the morning of the funeral and we spent the rest of the day together. The trip to the church was full of the catch up conversations that are inevitable with people you've not seen for many years. But then it all started to catch up with us.

That moment at a funeral when you see the coffin for the first time is impossibly hard. The cold hard reality that the person you loved so much is really dead is completely unavoidable. Lizzie's funeral was very simple - just as she'd planned it. All of the people who spoke or sang were there at her request. There was some comfort that the hundreds of us who were there were participating in something she'd created, but at the same time, that it was the last thing she'd organise wasn't far from my thoughts. Her husband told all three of us that she'd have been so glad we were there - which triggered memories of her mother saying something similar to me when I flew across for her father's funeral, and again her brother Peter saying it when I went to their mother's funeral a few years later. I can remember Lizzie's face in amongst the sea of faces at my mother's funeral too, and how loved I felt seeing her and so many others of my friends who were there for me as well as my mother. 

Coming home closed some pages. A funeral is, after all, a ritual that enables us to say goodbye. But none of us wanted to do that. I sat at the airport waiting for my flight and the thing that wouldn't leave my head was that I was leaving there and I'd not seen Lizzie, as I usually did when I visited... I just couldn't get my head around that. I still can't get my head around it. 

At times like this, we look for explanations, rationales, anything that can help us make sense of something that just doesn't make any sense. We ask questions like, 'how could someone so young, so good, die?' The reality is that there are no answers to those questions. 

From the experience of grieving my mother, I am expecting that Lizzie's death will mean entering that weird loop of feelings yet again - because death and grieving doesn't offer a straight line you can follow. The feelings come back over and over, often at the most inconvenient and unexpected times. They don't go away. They change a bit over time because we change as we gain different life experiences. It's not a circle, as such, but a spiral where we can come back to a place that feels similar to where we've been before, but it's a little different each time as we go on living. The memories grow sweeter, and the regrets that we've been that much longer without those loved ones grow, the conversations that we'll not have any more - although, I do find myself talking to my mother now and again...she just doesn't talk back any more. 

At the end of Lizzie's funeral, we were offered sprigs of rosemary to leave on her coffin - a herb that symbolises memory. In Judaism, there is a teaching that says that a person never truly dies while someone remembers them. It's why we mark their yarzeit (yearly anniversary of their death) by reciting the Mourner's Kaddish in their name. Those daily memories that we can share with others in between are part of the remembering and the healing. And that healing will come, I know. I'm just not there yet.  

Elegy for Lizzie

Synchronicity is the strangest thing. It's very easy for skeptics to dismiss it as coincidence, but I've never quite been able to think that. On Friday afternoon, I received a phone call from the husband of one of my oldest friends in response to a text message I'd just sent, to let me know she could no longer respond, and the end could be any time. The next morning, while out with Dragon Dad, I read an article in The Sydney Morning Herald by regular columnist Julia Baird - which you can read HERE. Baird writes poignantly of her experience of cancer, being a woman diagnosed with cancer whose children aren't yet grown, and has a message that's all too important that we all need to take on board and honour those we've lost by living;

When I came out of the hospital, everyone suddenly seemed consumed with irrelevant, foolish, temporal worries. Reading the fine print of your mortality is a great sifter of rubbish. I frowned at the complaints posted on social media when I was recovering — people who had the flu, were annoyed by politicians, burdened by work, or who were juggling jobs and children — and wanted to scream: BUT YOU ARE ALIVE!!!! Alive! Each day is a glory, especially if upright and able to move with ease, without pain.

I want to qualify the last sentence from the perspective of living with chronic disease - some days I can't move with ease, I'm not upright, and I'm not without pain, BUT, I AM STILL ALIVE!!!

My dear friend Lizzie Clarkson Akeley is not. She lost her fight yesterday afternoon, eight months after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. 

Lizzie was a year older than me, but we met in first year at the Elder Conservatorium, University of Adelaide. She had spent the previous year on exchange in Germany - an experience I envied. We were the only female first year students playing brass instruments, in a heavily male dominated group - she played trombone, and I played French horn. There were two other girls the year ahead of us, who both played horn. I was always a bit socially awkward, especially in that very male environment but Lizzie had - as a mutual friend said yesterday - a breezy way with her that seemed to carry her through all sorts of social situations with ease. 

While I pulled out of the degree at the end of second year for a range of different reasons, Lizzie finished it and went on to qualify as a teacher. With another of our uni mates, she ended up in the South Australian riverland region, teaching music at high schools in a number of small towns. I was away from Adelaide for almost two years, but came back for a mutual friend's wedding, and caught up with her there, and then picked up the friendship when I returned after my marriage failed. That was a period of time when our uni crowd seemed to spend a lot more time together - I have a lovely collection of photographs of a number of gatherings, where we caught up and compared notes on burgeoning careers. 

Lizzie was one of the first of us to go further afield. Her parents had been Christian missionaries, and she headed to Youth with a Mission in Montana, USA, to join their mission planting churches in various countries around the world. She met and married Corey there and they went on to live in some crazy places. Their first child, Sarah, was born in Greece - that being Lizzie's better option, given they were living in Albania at the time!

Eventually, they moved back to Adelaide to spend more time with family. Sadly, Lizzie's father was diagnosed with Alzheimers, and for many years they cared for him as he deteriorated, succumbing in the end to complications of the disease. By then, I'd moved back to Sydney - my hometown - so flew back for the funeral. As is the case with funerals, it was an opportunity to catch up with a lot of people I'd not seen for a long time - including the rest of her family with whom I'd spent so much time during our uni days, having sleepovers, sharing holidays, and at one point, Lizzie tried to set me up with her oldest brother!

In the ten years I've been back in Sydney, I've caught up with Lizzie most times I've been back to Adelaide, and she and Sarah spent a day with us when they were coming through Sydney after a cruise a few years back.

Lizzie lost her mother to lymphoma a few years ago, and then, tragically, her other brother Peter was taken by sharks off Port Lincoln. She and Richard, her oldest brother, spent many years wading through the quagmire of administration of his affairs, complicated by the way he'd died. 

In all the years I knew Lizzie, no matter what experiences she was having, she had one of the most positive attitudes of anyone I know. A lot of that had to do with her Christian faith. That was certainly something that sustained her through some terrible losses over the last ten years. She was never one to complain, even when she may well have had every right to - it just wasn't her way. Even last year, when she called me to pick my brains because she'd been diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis and was, as most people are initially, floundering in a stack of information and well-meaning mis-information, she was optimistic about getting the disease under control and managing still to live well. 

I got to Adelaide towards the end of June to spend a day with her. She was having a reasonably good stretch at that point, and rang me in the week before to say that if things continued to be good, she was hoping to sing in a concert - she TOLD me it was a concert - with her choir in the morning, up in the hills, and would I be up for that and driving her? I said of course, and we lucked out and had a perfect clear and sunny Adelaide winter day for a drive up to Mt Barker. Only, it wasn't a concert - it was a full on Salvation Army service - THAT was an experience! But, Lizzie managed to sing her way through all the pieces, standing for every one. We headed back to her place for the afternoon, packing ourselves into comfy chairs to talk the day away. 

I can't remember much of what we talked about, to be honest. It was lots of the usual inconsequential things we always talked about - our kids, our animals, memories from uni and other times. It was just a normal kind of afternoon for us... And in that ordinariness, just such a special way to remember her. 

The world has lost an incredibly special woman in Lizzie. She was intelligent, sensitive, caring, beautiful, compassionate, loving and a loyal friend with whom I could pick up where we left off no matter how long it had been since we'd spent time. But those are just words. They don't do her vibrancy and sheer essence of life any justice at all. I am going to miss her terribly and visits to Adelaide will have a huge hole in them. Her funeral is going to be a gathering of our uni crowd like we've not had in a long time and it will feel awful not having her in the middle of it - although we will all be there for and because of her. My heart goes out to Corey, Sarah, Lydia and James, and her brother Richard who must be feeling very much alone.

Lichrono livracha, my dear friend, and may your memory always be a blessing.

New opportunity with Creaky Joints

Over the last few months -  while I've been neglecting this blog (!) - I've been settling into a new opportunity that arose for me as a blogger. The American organisation, Creaky Joints, has expanded to create an Australian branch. 

Creaky Joints is an organisation dedicated to promoting awareness, advocacy, and information on autoimmune arthritis. Autoimmune arthritis is NOT the arthritis you see remedy ads for on TV, or the type that your older friends and relatives may complain about - THAT is osteoarthritis. It is a component part of many autoimmune diseases, and presents very differently to osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis is the result of wear and tear on joints due to age or injury. It happens when the cartilage between the ends of bones in a joint wears away, leaving the surfaces of the bones rubbing against each other, causing pain. With autoimmune arthritis, systemic inflammation causes excess fluid build up in the joints, displacing them from normal alignment, resulting in abnormal wear and degenerative damage to the bones - erosions. One of the important aims of Creaky Joints is to create more understanding of the differences, and that autoimmune arthritis is NOT a complaint of age or injury - it can strike people of any age, and either gender.

I have Rheumatoid Arthritis (you can read the post I wrote about living with it HERE), an autoimmune disease causing my malfunctioning autoimmune system to attack my own tissues, particularly via my inflammatory system. The arthritis component is a symptom of the disease, not the primary aspect - the name of the disease causes untold confusion at times. It also causes chronic pain, fatigue (not just being tired - real fatigue from a chronic illness is a very different beast), flu-like symptoms, potential organ damage, potential eye and skin conditions, and many other nasty possibilities. Extremely severe cases can be terminal. 

I have been enormously privileged to join the ranks of the regular Creaky Joints bloggers. One of the vehicles for creating awareness is regular blog posts from both people with autoimmune diseases and medical personnel with and/or involved in the treatment of autoimmune arthritis. I am the second Australian based blogger, joining Arthritic Chick to offer a perspective uniquely about the Australian medical system and lived experience with a chronic illness.  

You can find my Creaky Joints posts HERE. Being a Creaky Joints blogger enables me to write more about living with this disease, and the various issues that are related. It's not something I want to focus on primarily in this blog - there are a lot of very find RA blogs out there, Arthritic Chick's being particularly good. I want this blog to be a place where I can write about all sorts of things that are important to me, and that are important partly through my experience as a parent, but as it develops, beyond that too...

The Original Dragon Mother's 'KFC'

Competing with the ads for fast food can be a nightmare sometimes, so coming up with homemade substitutes can be one way to silence the grumblers. I came up with this idea many years ago when the boys were small, and it's been a firm family favourite ever since. The stepson got added to the long list of kids who've eaten it over the years, and it's one of my standbys for quick dinners, picnics (it's also good cold) and it used to go into lunch boxes when I was still packing them. It's a recipe both the boys asked for when they left home, and it's one I've given to so many friends that I figured it was time to drop it in here.

The proportions of the spices in the dusting mix for the chicken are a starting point - I don't tend to measure it any more, and sometimes I play around with the spice mix too, depending on how I'm feeling or what's available. What you DO want to achieve is good colour in the dusting mix by the time you've added your spices. It shouldn't still be too white. I've added sumac, dried oregano, and garlic salt in the past. You could also use onion powder, and small amounts of some of the sweet spices for a more Moroccan flavour base. I'd suggest starting with the base recipe and then tweaking according to your family's tastes. Don't panic about there not being any oil in the chicken instructions - the drumsticks will baste themselves, and the skin will get very crunchy as a result. 

 Crunchy Spiced Chicken Drumsticks

Ingredients

• 12 chicken drumsticks, skin on
• 10 medium sized roasting potatoes
• 1 cup plain flour
• 1 tablespoon smoked paprika
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin
• 1 tablespoon ground coriander
• 1 teaspoon ground turmeric
• Cayenne pepper to taste (optional)*
• freshly ground black pepper
• sea salt
• olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced

Method

1. Preheat oven to 200 C (375 F).
2. Line a two shallow baking dishes with baking paper and preheat while preparing the ingredients.
3. In a large zip lock bag, combine flour, spices, salt and a generous grinding of pepper. Drop chicken pieces into the mixture and shake to coat lightly.
4. Do not peel potatoes. Cut in walnut sized chunks. In a large bowl, toss with sliced garlic in enough olive oil to coat lightly. Season with salt and pepper.
5. Lay chicken in a single layer on one baking tray with spaces between the pieces. Tip the potatoes onto the other baking tray.
6. Roast 40 – 45 minutes, turning chicken and potatoes every fifteen minutes. Large drumsticks may take a little longer. When the juices run clear, the chicken is done. Potatoes should be golden and crunchy.

Child Friendly Tossed Salad With the Works

Getting salads and vegetables into children can be a challenge that too often becomes a nightmare. While the chicken and potatoes are in the oven, get the kids into the kitchen helping to put this fresh combination of fruit and vegetables together. Again, this isn't a definitive list of ingredients. It IS one that balances well, but you can play with that according to the things your kids enjoy. Leave the nuts out if you have under 4s, and if your kids are fine with a vinegar based dressing, you can do that instead of the lemon juice in the recipe. Of course, if they're not into dressing at all, serve it on the side and they can have theirs naked!

Ingredients

• 1 punnet cherry tomatoes
• 2 handfuls of baby green beans
• 1 red capsicum
• 2 Lebanese cucumbers
• 2 oranges
• 2 cobs sweetcorn
• ½ cup toasted pistachios
• 2 cups mixed baby salad greens
• Virgin olive oil
• Juice of half a lemon
• Salt and freshly ground pepper

Method

With a sharp knife, slice the kernels off the corn cobs. Heat a tablespoon of the oil in a frying pan over medium heat and sauté the corn kernels gently, stirring occasionally, until they are tender and starting to brown slightly. Remove from heat and cool.
Top and tail baby beans and blanch for one minute in boiling water. Drain and refresh immediately in cold water to stop them cooking.
Core capsicum, discarding the seeds. Halve and slice crosswise into a large salad bowl. Add halved cherry tomatoes. Halve cucumbers lengthwise and slice on the diagonal, add to bowl. Slice skin off oranges, removing all the pith. Halve and slice thinly, and add to other ingredients. Toss in sweetcorn kernels, pistachios and mixed salad greens.
Season and add about a tablespoon of olive oil and the lemon juice. Toss lightly together and serve with the chicken and potatoes.
Serves a family of four.

* Omit cayenne if children are sensitive to heat or allergic to chilli.

PS. I have NO idea why the font is publishing so small - it looks the right size in the template. Happens every time I copy and paste from another document. Gotta love the technology!

Balanced Parenting #3 - Giving the Kids Responsibilities

After MUCH delay - life, illness, and everything - here is #3 in my series. 

I started my parenting journey 30 years ago - true story...No.1 was 30 at the end of April! At the time, it must have been the beginning of what seems to me to be the majority parenting style I'm seeing now - kids scheduled up to their eyes in extra-curricular activities to the point of having no time to just 'be', let alone be part of the active running of the household. Parents are more pushed for time too, and the idea of letting the kids do stuff that night not get done 'properly' or in a way that might create more mess can start to look like more effort than it's worth. In the long term though, that's generally not the case.

It's a far cry from the way I grew up. As a little kid, I had piano lessons one afternoon a week, and Brownies another day. There was a brief spell with dance classes, but I was never going to be a successful dancer... Otherwise, my out of school time was a mix of doing my own thing and chores. It was the same for all of my friends too, and as I recall, no one really complained - it's just the way it was. We moved interstate when I was midway through primary school, and the chores accumulated as I got older and was able to do more. I spent time with my mother learning to cook, and being given more and more responsibility for parts of the meals. It got me out of doing the dishes, which was a bonus - my brother got those because I'd done my bit with dinner. I also spent time with Mum learning to sew, and made my first skirt when I was about 12, I think. We got chooks - feeding them and collecting the eggs became one of my jobs. And so on. 

I honestly didn't think about it when I had the boys - I just did the same thing. As they got bigger, I gave them things to do, so it became 'normal' for them to be doing stuff regularly around the house. When I got sick, it was vital that they be able to contribute because I honestly couldn't manage it all by myself sometimes - from the time No.2 was four, I was on my own. I have a photo of No.1, aged about three, maybe, parked ON the kitchen bench where I was preparing vegetables for dinner. He's peeling potatoes - his first time, from memory, so they were pretty rough, and I did have to finish them off, but he wanted to try SO badly, so I struck while the iron was hot. I did this at EVERY opportunity while they were both very tiny - for them, as littlies, being given 'jobs' was exciting. It was a chance to do what I, as a grown up, was doing. Obviously, there were things they couldn't manage due to their size, or that weren't safe. You have to use your common sense. BUT, they're NEVER too young to start doing things around the house, and the earlier you start, the more normal it will be for them to be making a contribution.

So, what kind of things, and when do you start them? I did it quite organically, taking my lead from their interest, and my own needs sometimes - if they wanted to play but washing HAD to be brought in...I took them outside with me and gave them the pegs to drop in the bucket while I folded things off the line. It sounds small, but it's an incremental process. I had a hunt around and came across a whole stack of lists online - ages and jobs. I don't think you have to be too bound by the divisions - be guided by your child. This one was the one I liked the most, that tallied most closely with the kinds of things my boys were doing at similar ages. It comes from https://www.henrybear.com/blog/spring-cleaning/ and was used in the context of spring cleaning - finding suitable jobs for the kids during a big clean. However, a regular habit was a better thing to aim for, I found, so that there was ongoing input from the kids. (Click on the image to make it bigger.)

I can imagine exclamations of horror at the very thought of having a preschooler unloading the dishwasher and dusting, but here's a thing: No.2 LOVED 'doing jobs'. He was a child with an immense drive to be useful. He did plenty of imaginative play - mad cities built of books, blocks, Lego and Duplo - anything he could add that worked. He spent hours in the sandpit creating worlds. BUT, he was most happy when he was doing something that counted - like dishes. We had a dishwasher when he was small, but he really loved being parked on a chair at a sink full of soapy water, washing the plastic cups and plates he used. When the teachers at his day care centre had trouble keeping him focused and occupied, I suggested to them that they give him the dishes from fruit time to wash - they even had a sink set in a low kid sized bench. They wouldn't do it. They felt it was wrong to have him 'working' instead of being occupied with some more conventional play activity. Thing was, if he had been given those dishes, he'd have been happy, occupied, focused and feeling useful. 

No.1 was less enamoured of doing chores. However, he'd grown up in a situation where it was normal, so he did them, mostly without making much of a fuss. As the teenage hormones kicked in, that wasn't always the case, but by then, he knew that there'd be consequences he wouldn't like if he didn't pitch in and a reminder of that was usually sufficient to get him moving.

What they didn't realise at the time, of course, was that there was a bigger picture that I had in the back of my head. One day, those cute little boys were going to walk out into the world and set up their own households. How the hell were they supposed to do that if they never learned HOW to keep a house...

There's not a lot to be gained by trying to do everything yourself while the kids don't do anything around the house. You'll get pushed beyond your limits, you'll be exhausted all the time, you'll start getting resentful - especially since, if they're not expected to pick up after themselves (at the very least), let alone do actual jobs, they're not going to give much thought to the trail of death and destruction they're leaving behind themselves... It'll get a LOT worse over time, and you'll be fighting a constant losing battle with an ever growing amount of running around after other people, while no one thinks to help. Think about it. Do you want that for yourself? And do you want your kids growing up incapable of looking after themselves?

I can promise you some messy times in the early stages while they learn to do things. The kitchen WILL get wetter when little ones are washing up. Flour can travel amazing distances across a kitchen when they're cooking. The socks might not be in perfect, regulation balls when they're paired. But all these things will get better as the kids get more skilled. And you will find, over time, that your house will run smoothly and it won't be you doing all the work. 

You can read the rest of the series here:

http://theoriginaldragonmother.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/balanced-parenting-1-get-enough-sleep.html 

 http://theoriginaldragonmother.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/balanced-parenting-2-eating-well.html