A lot of people think that kids these days are spoiled. And it’s easy to see why. Kids often have tons of toys, electronics and family life can seem to center around them.

Heck, the Navy even compared the current generation reaching recruitment age to aliens! Basically they feel that kids these days speak such strange jargon with their abbreviations (LOL), and that they are excessively used to being praised.

Well, we can argue that one back and forth all the time. Certainly a lot of parents have been told to do everything they can for their child’s self esteem, and many take that to mean praise every little thing. But I still have faith that most parents do the best they can and try not to overdo it.

I agree with the experts over on WebMD. They have a great list on how to raise a spoiled child.

One of the easiest mistakes to make in my opinion is not enforcing rules consistently. I suspect we all do this to some degree. The challenge is to not do it too much, and most especially to keep it consistent on the most important rules.

I love the idea of knowing how to praise a child properly. In a lot of ways I don’t think it’s so much what you praise as how you praise it. It’s been shown that telling your child that they’re smart is not as effective as telling they you’re proud of how hard they worked. It’s just more motivating.

I do know my kids have a lot more toys than they need. We have a plan to go through them hopefully soon and get rid of at least half. That will take care of a lot of the clutter. And you know what? My daughter is looking forward to it. We just did a smaller cleanout of her clothes, and she was delighted and very proud to have worked so hard on that kind of a project.

I don’t think my kids are too spoiled. I work hard at making sure they know they are a part of my life, but not the only thing. They help around the house. They have rules to follow. It seems to work pretty well.

[tags]spoiled kids,navy aliens,children,family,rules[/tags]

It’s been a busy morning. Getting ready to dog-sit two very sweet dogs. One’s diabetic and he’ll be a bit of extra work, but absolutely the mellowest dog I’ve ever met.

1. Made daughter’s lunch for school.
2. Walked my daughter to school.
3. 1 load laundry because 2-1/2 year old son wet his bed.
4. Emptied dishwasher.
5. Put dirty dishes in dishwasher.
6. Cleaned countertops.
7. Watched Sesame Street with my son (he insists on this one, hates to watch it alone).
8. Put son down for nap.
9. Swept kitchen floor.
10. Mopped kitchen floor.
11. Swept office floor.
12. Mopped office floor.
13. Posted my Thursday Thirteen.

Nope, the day’s not done yet by a long shot. Going to be mixing housework with working online all day, making sure the house is reasonably dog-proof. Can’t have the younger dog thinking the kids’ toys are dog toys. She probably won’t but you know how it is. Why risk it?

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I am so glad we haven’t had to move these past two years. It hardly seems that long but I am so glad that I haven’t had to go through that stress again. Moving has to be one of my least favorite things to do, although whenever we can afford to buy our own home, I will move quite cheerfully.

When we moved into this house a bit over two years ago it was my first time using professional movers. I am so glad we did. This was just after Gage had had his surgery, and was our third move in about seven months. Yes, we moved twice while I was pregnant with him. Talk about stress.

We really should have made it easier on ourselves by the second time, but we didn’t. The third move we were just sick of calling on family members to help us, which is why we chose to hire movers that time.

But it might have been a bit less stressful if we had known about sitse such as www.homebulletin.net that help you find movers. Calling movers was really, really tedious, not something I wanted to deal with at the time (you try it with an infant recovering from surgery!). Their site has a simple form you can fill out to have movers call you. Very simple. They also have useful moving tips such as a moving checklist.

I know I’ll have to move again someday; I don’t intend to rent forever, after all, but I think I’m definitely sticking with professional movers. It was just such a stress saver.

I’ve been working for a while now on a new section for this site on being a virtual assistant. It’s one of the great areas for people to work at home.

The section is still being developed, but the pages that are complete so far I hope will be very useful, so I decided to post them now. I expect to keep adding pages as I go through my research.

[tags]work at home,home business,virtual assistants[/tags]

[tags]wordless wednesday[/tags]