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Encouraging Heroes. You can be one too.

Growing up, my mom always had adorable decorations around the house for every season. She even had ceramic figurines that she’d painted herself, and there were adornments for every room.

I have routinely failed to even approach her holiday spirit, mainly because I’m a workaholic and keep finding other things to do so I never have time to drag out the decorations (which are, ironically, neatly stored by category because the organizing part? I like that part). The other reason is I’m cheap and tend not to buy decorations very often. If they’re 70% off the day after the holiday, then I like them. But usually the pickin’s are slim by then. Oh well.

What that translates to is I only have decorations for fall/Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. The boys love holidays, especially all the decorations and celebration stuff that I am, ummmm, less sentimental about.

For the last few years I’ve managed to get the Christmas stuff up and around, but not the other seasons. I knew there would come a time when they called me on that, and that time has arrived.

I’ve been trying to figure out a time to drag the box out and then look critically at each decoration and find its perfect (and hopefully safe from 4 boys and a puppy) location around the home. This takes time that I do not want to spend.

This morning, genius struck! I told the boys, “For every assignment you finish, you may take out a decoration and put it around the house.” Voila!!! Everyone’s happy, and I figure there’s a 20% chance they’ll put things out of harm’s way. At least all I have to do is patrol rather than figure out for myself.

Now, all I have to do is figure a way to get them to pick up all the decorations next month. I’ll be plotting……

Earnest Parenting: help for parents who don’t like to decorate.