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Strollerderby
Need help wrapping presents? Try TaskRabbit or Zaarly.
Now that it’s holiday season, your to-do list has likely exploded. On top of your job either in or outside the home, you may have cards to send out, family to entertain, gifts to buy and packages to mail, with no extra time to fit it all in. Wish you had some extra arms and legs? There’s an app for that. A new story in the Wall Street Journal examines two websites that let you farm out your chores.
TaskRabbit already has people assisting those who need help with such holiday tasks as gift-wrapping, snow shoveling, stuffing gift bags, assisting with Christmas parties, serving dinner for Rosh Hashannah and decorating. And it’s not just holiday-related chores, but any kind of work people need help with, including grocery shopping, filing, cleaning, organizing, furniture assembly, packing, virtual office assistance and more.
Blogger Kristen Howerton, of Rage Against the Minivan and She Posts, wrote about her experience using TaskRabbit and said she loved it. She has used the service to get help with everything from buying and delivering a kid’s bike from Wal-Mart to her house to organizing and labeling her children’s toy drawers. She wrote, “I am here to tell you: I am a convert. I am their new best customer. The experience this month was so great that I decided not to keep looking for household help . . . I’m just going to hire a TaskRabbit when I need something done.”
Somebody needs a CD of Barney's "Clean Up" song
When we were kids, my sister and I used to have to take turns setting and clearing the dinner table and washing the dishes. Each time it was my night to wash the dishes, I used to imagine I was Cinderella and being forced into slave labor by my evil mother as I scrubbed at the pots and pans.
Of course now that I’m a mom I understand the value of getting your child to participate in household duties and messes, particularly ones they had a hand in making.
Still, I admire the chutzpah of an 11-year-old German boy who called police to complain of “forced labor” after his mom told him to help clean their house.
Checking her to-do list?
I have a friend who’s a doctor. She has three kids. Her husband’s commute is about 45 minutes, hers is about 20. One day a few years ago, I was in her kitchen and she asked me to look something up in her in-box. “It’ll be in the “Thomas” folder,” she sang out from the stove. I opened her inbox and there it was: a huge, elaborate email folder tree with branches for each child, for work, for shopping, for play dates, for library books.
It was this friend that I thought of when I read about how parents can use apps to manage their lives. For example, there’s an app with a shared calendar and to-do lists. You can use it to smooth out the complications of the family schedule, including but limited to: cleaning the house, getting children to school and activities, working, and both eating and shopping for food.
Here’s how it works: a parent (in the story it was the mom-shocking!), puts everything the family has to do for the week into the online calendar system, including chores. She’s also put in contacts that anyone might need to help make their family work- babysitter, neighbors, family members. Family members have a to-do list. When someone’s on the calendar, he gets an email reminder and the mom gets notification of his response. Genius! Continue reading »
Chores. The dull drudgery of family life. Setting the table. Cleaning the dishes. Folding laundry. The very phrase, ‘this feels like a chore,’ is a cliche for describing a task that’s become boring and unpleasant.
Few of us at any age want these jobs, but they must be done. Training children to do them is the topic of much hand-wringing, gold-star-awarding and punishment. It’s a subject of constant debate among parents.
Today, Motherlode asks the seemingly simple question: what chores are appropriate to assign to children? At what age?
The question looks simple, but it begs others: do you assign children chores at all? How do you hold them accountable if the chores aren’t done? Do you reward them for doing it right? How do you decide what a chore is anyway?
If researchers were to set up video cameras up in your home and record your family life for a week, what do you think they would see? If the California families who participated in just such an experiment are any indication, they’d see fussing, fighting and a whole lot of stress and mess.
The video experiment, conducted by University of California graduate students from 2002 to 2005, recorded the everyday lives of 32 middle class families living in the Los Angeles area. Though ethnically diverse, the families shared a few important characteristics: All had two working parents and multiple children. Continue reading »
Two Mississippi tots found a fun way to entertain themselves while their mother did laundry at a local laundromat: The four-year-0ld pushed his seven-month-old baby brother around in a rolling basket.
The game turned (more) dangerous, though, when the older boy pushed the basket up against his mother’s washing machine. The baby leaned over to get a closer look, and the boy pushed the baby in.
In our house, everyone helps out with chores. For the most part, I do the cooking and my wife does the clean-up because that’s where our strengths lie, but we aren’t locked into those roles. But the idea of “women’s work” is not new — there is a reason there is so much humor based on the idea of men not cleaning up after themselves or trying to get them to help out. In our culture, housework is not seen as masculine. Well, if you’ve had a hard time getting your partner to help out around the house, things just got a whole lot worse.
Continue reading »
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