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When Janet Nusbaum, owner of www.KidsandChores.net contacted me about her chore system for families I was intrigued.  When she offered to send me the book I was thrilled!  This isn’t your ordinary chore system!  Here’s what Janet told me about it:

With the purchase of one system, you receive the 133-page parent’s workbook and 1 ‘In My Family Everyone Works Together’ chore binder.  The system is designed for each child in the family age 5-18 to have their own ‘In My Family Everyone Works Together’ chore binder, which is a poly-construction mini-binder (that I had custom-made) containing the chore cards you have assigned to that child. 

Each binder includes a full set of 80+ chore cards, of different skill levels. Based on age-appropriate chore charts in the workbook, you the parent choose which chore cards go in each child’s binder based on their age.  As the child matures, you add or delete chore cards from their binder.

The beauty of the system is that the child takes ownership of their chore binder, which serves as their own instruction manual of how they contribute to their family.  Consistently, I see kids take pride in having their own chore binder, and thus they take pride in their contribution to their family – they feel special and needed.  This concept is a 100% improvement over a standard wall chore chart or similar.

Ok, I said before that this isn’t your ordinary chore setup. It is an entire home makeover in my opinion. I sat down and went through the workbook and was amazed at the approach. It is all about a complete restructuring of the way you view the work involved in getting and keeping the home clean and running smoothly. It also has some great overall parental helps like learning your children’s personality as well as an ENTIRE chart on what chores are apporpriate at what age!!!!

The organization and household help doesn’t stop there though!  In addition to the wonderful system Janet offers at www.KidsandChores.net, she also offers tons more for you and your family at www.SimplifiedSpaces.net where you can sign up for their free report and newsletter and the Simplified Home Store for all your organizing and simplifying needs!

Janet has offered all of you the opportunity to get a free second binder with any complete chore system purchase.  Just head over to www.KidsandChores.net to purchase a complete “Mom Can I Help Around the House?” system and be sure you mention in the comments as you check out that you heard about them at A Frog In My Soup!!  Hurry over though, this offer expires on July 23rd!

She has also offered one of you the opportunity to receive a complete “Mom Can I Help Around the House?” system!  Here’s what you need to do …

~ Visit www.KidsandChores.net and take a look around, you can also visit her other site Simplified Spaces and view the products there.

~Come back here and leave a comment telling me what your favorite product is and why you need it!

This contest is open for entries from the USA, Canada, Australia and Europe! You may enter through July 11th.

*I’m updating this post to add a little note that my sis left in the comments - I think it should go here to round out the story LOL.  Scroll down to the bottom of the story for her little note!*

Not just any old mattress either … nope … a KING SIZE MATTRESS.  But I should start at the beginning ………

As many of you know we are trying to get the house organized, clean and otherwise prepared for the possibility of putting it on the market.  The problem is that in order to do that we have to overhaul our little house.  It was so bad I knew I had to enlist some serious help.  That help came in the form of my next younger sister who really is great at organizing and purging.

She’s been here many times, but one of the biggest projects was to switch our bedroom and the other front bedroom that housed 4 of our boys.  We had put this mammoth task off, and finally had to face it.  So we began, moving cribs, a dresser and a set of bunkbeds (plus all of the various oddities contained within and underneath) out into the living room - completely blocking off access to the kitchen and bathroom in the process, but oh well (LOL). 

Then we headed into the “Master” bedroom - oh BOY!  The fact that our bed never did fit in the room right and was crammed up against a wall with the door barely able to open on the other side was just something I had gotten used to.  Also knowing that 3 years of “stuff” had accumulated under and around the bed in unreachable areas was also something I knew existed.  I warned Sis … “remember, I cannot guarantee what we’ll find under here.”  She just looked at me and smiled.

We had to begin with the mattress … 2 women with 1 king size mattress that was truly almost bigger than the room.  Not only was it nearly impossible to get it off the bed, but how on earth were we to contort it to the point where we could squeeze it out of the door????  Well, with much craziness we did.

OK, Now what do we do with it.  Originally Sis had decided that we simply needed to find a place to stash it until Hubby got home.  Making sure that it was located where he would have to get it out of the house, but that we were still able to function for the rest of the day.  Apparently she had decided this was no longer an option - that we must get the mattress to the garage ourselves. 

Our garage is detatched … many feet from the house … down a grassy hill.  Do any of you have a clue how much a King size mattress weighs?????  Two women absolutely cannot lift one, we could push it but NOT lift it.  So how on earth did she plan to get it down to the garage?  Well, as we had been hauling other things down to the garage, she had spotted two of the children’s plastic sleds. 

Being a very original and creative thinker (she didn’t want to learn to drive because she was afraid she’d be driving down the freeway and see a bug on the guardrail and wonder if she could hit it … yup), she had decided that these two sleds were exactly what we needed to accomplish the monster of moving this mattress.

She entered the house with those two sleds in tow and I asked her “what on earth?” and laughed when she told me why.  I didn’t think she was serious.  Honestly.  This would NEVER have occured to me - too creative.

So, we drug the mammoth mattress over to her nicely placed sleds and heaved it onto them.  It was a little crooked and very cumbersome, so I began to have my doubts.  We slid it out the door - I was in front and Sis was in back.  I began to heave it down onto the grass from the front porch and suddenly it wasn’t moving anymore.  That’s when we ran into our first “glitch”. 

The mattress was stuck between the porch flooring and the roof covering it.  So we began zigzagging this lovely mattress to try and un-stick it :) .  Finally out it came and almost went down too!  With Sis hanging on for dear life to one side and me hanging on for dear life on the other, suddenly we were losing it.  The mattress was sooooo very heavy, it kept sliding off of the sleds and we still had at least 100 feet to go - OH BOY! 

We pushed and we pulled and we lost one sled along the way and were laughing so hard half way there I thought we’d never make it.  I mean the doubled over-laughing so hard you’re crying kind of laughing.  I can’t imagine the thoughts of the few people who drove by - “Oh my word those crazy women …” LOL!

Finally, still laughing we made it down to the garage.  We had one last tricky little maneuver to make though since the garage is about a foot lower than the grassy area (don’t ask ).  So we skipped it over the edge and onto the concrete floor of the garage.  Thankfully once it was there it was a breeze to slide into place. 

Shortly after we got the Beast into the garage, my sister made the comment (as we’re still laughing and crying), “Why do I get the feeling I’ll end up as tomorrow’s blog post?”.  I stopped short, looked at her and said “Sure, I actually hadn’t thought about that”. 

Now, the problem here is that my sister and her ultra-creative-I-thought-of-the-sled mind would have been the perfect person to re-tell this story.  But since she isn’t a blogger and didn’t take me up on my suggestion to be the one to write about it, she will now have to read this post and think of all the funny and interesting things I left out.  Well, I did my best

Just a word of warning though:  If you are a down-to-earth, logical type woman and happen to have a creative-thinking-off-the-beaten-path sister, DO NOT ASK HER TO HELP YOU MOVE A MATTRESS!  You could wind up in a pickle!

*A Note From Sis*

You did, as always, an amazing job retelling the story but you missed one little point. As the cars were driving by you actually said “maybe someone will stop and help us” and you sounded HOPEFUL!

I was mortified hoping and praying that we somehow blended into the landscape, or came across as 2 perfectly normal women doing a little moving. Not you, you were ready to flag down a innocent passing motorist. Have you no PRIDE?!

This experience has taught me two things; first, a kingsize matress has no backbone to keep it standing up straight on two sleds (the one flaw in my otherwise brilliant plan). Second, there is no one I laugh harder with than my sister! love you!