A family meeting

Last night we called our first official Bishop family meeting. Knowing us it will probably be the last, as inconsistent as we are! Although the meeting was to talk about expectations and consistency, so hopefully we will start to see some changes.

Those of you with small children, I don't need to say more than BEDTIME for you to know what that entails. Excuse, after excuse, after excuse! It's getting SO old and we spend two hours every night after putting the kids in bed dealing with excuses from at least one or two kids at a time! I guess that's our fault for having four kids but that is beside the point.

In addition, there has been a lot of attitude and mumbling under their breath-primarily from Katherine and Kaleb. On the Kaleb front it is usually yelling at me and grumbling about every little thing or just flat out refusing to do what I said. It is exhausting, having kids.

So our meeting last night was to address those two issues in particular. We wanted to sit down with everyone and talk to them about being respectful of others-to my surprise every single one had an example of being respectful (my three year old included!) and examples of being disrespectful. Apparently they know what respect is and what it is not, which made the conversation a lot easier. The older kids said it is one of their 5 expectations (or something to that effect) that they do at school, and it is obvious that Olivia knew what it meant when she said that not getting up at nap time was respectful and that not listening was disrespectful. The conversation overall was very insightful-it is amazing to me how much these kids understand. I don't give them enough credit!

Anyway...my whole reason for explaining all of that is to document something funny that Abbey said. Those of you who have met my lovely, free-spirited Abbey Rose understand what I say when I say "Abbey is Abbey." She's just...well...Abbey. And she has been asking me FOR DAYS when she can wash dishes again. I let her wash dishes about 3 months ago, and I'll be honest with you-she did NOT do a good job! I had to rewash them all-this was at a time when our dishwasher was not functioning. So lately we have talked about keeping the house clean, and so perhaps this is what has renewed her interest in dish washing. Now that we have a new dishwasher, I don't have to wash anything by hand except my PC cookware, stones and knives. And all of those are either too sharp or too heavy for my six-year-old to wash.

A few days agao she asked me again when she could wash the dishes. I kept telling her soon. So a couple of days went by without her saying anything else about it, until last night at our little meeting. When we asked her what is something she has done recently that has shown respect she answered "Being patient waiting to wash the dishes again." My point is this-Abbey is dead set on washing some dishes! It was really funny.

Katherine, always thinking, has already made a mental list of about 10 things she would like to address at our next family meeting.

It is going to be hard to be consistent, seeing as how Kris and I don't have much practice in that area! But I know it will really cut down on a lot of these 'issues' we have at home.