The girls have really "exploded" in helpfulness recently! I've already told you about them needing their own mops. A has totally taken over the weekly mopping of the bathroom & L does a wonderfully thorough job on a section of the kitchen while I do a quick, much less thorough job on the rest of the kitchen.
And I think I've also mentioned that they figured out to work together to unload & load the dishwasher by one standing on the stool & the other handing the clean dishes to her, then the one on the stool taking the dirty dishes out of the sink and handing to the other to put in the dishwasher. This is seriously SOOO helpful! And I don't even care about the added "cost" of less efficiently loaded dishwasher, I love that they can do this!
And NOW, they vacuum too! Since the beginning of the "mop obsession" A has also been following me through the whole house w/ her toy vacuum "vacuuming" right along with me & I'd commented to dh more then once that I really wished they made an affordable REAL kid sized vacuum so I could hand the vacuuming over to her. She's a strong kid, but I just don't think she's strong enough or tall enough to take over the Dyson by herself (and considering the cost of Dysons, I'm not willing to let her try until I'm confident she can do it). BUT when I was looking for the mops for the girls, I noticed a rechargeable vacuum that claimed to work on carpet & hard floors. So when I was back at that store this week I looked at it abit closer & decided it was worth trying to see if the kids could use it. The verdict? Its definitely lightweight enough for the kids, they even carried it up the stairs on their own. It does a great job of picking up the crumbs on the hard floor. I'm pretty sure it does NOT pull any ground in dirt up out of the carpet, but does a quick job of getting any loose dirt up off the carpet at least. The girls FOUGHT over who got to use it (compromise, A vacuumed the downstairs & L vacuumed the upstairs). So, my current thought is that we'll use it on the hard floors before mopping and kind of alternate weeks using it upstairs or downstairs on the carpet so I don't have to carry the Dyson up & down the stairs so often (so, for example, at the moment the Dyson's on the main floor. Next week I'll use the Dyson on the carpets on this floor while the girls use the sweeper on the hard floors & all the upstairs floors. Then the next week I'll carry the Dyson upstairs and for 2 weeks I'll vacuum upstairs & the girls will use the sweeper on the downstairs carpets. That's my current plan anyway . . .
The girls are tickled pink to be able to REALLY help. And I seriously stood there kind of trying to decide what I should be doing while they vacuumed & mopped the house for me LOL (actually when they were upstairs, I used the time to unpack some boxes in my room since there's still plenty of unpacking to do, but still . . .).
DH also tells me that last weekend at Grandmom's house the girls each took a turn actually flipping the pancakes so basically if it were safe for them to use the stove alone they could completely make pancakes all by themselves at this point!
Sniff, my kids are growing up WAY too fast.
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