"Minute to clean it" really can work!

So now I've decided to take a different approach. I was in the Dr.'s office with my five year old with an ear infection . . . our 2nd visit to the Dr. for a child with an ear infection that week . . . and it occurred to me - Julie had Julia, Robyn had Oprah, why can't I have Mickey Mouse as my inspiration?! My friends would find that so fitting!

The Dr.'s office had a copy of the Disney Family Fun magazine and it was at that point that I decided to try 365 days of Family Fun. So, my format will be top 3 lessons learned from my attempts to have family fun. My sources won't just be the Disney Family Fun magazine, and the "fun" won't always be fun (like today where I'm going to talk about cleaning up the house), but I'm sure they will be entertaining.

My first attempt at family fun was a recommendation from the magazine about how to make clean up fun. A woman suggested setting the timer for 1 minute and seeing how much your children can clean up in 1 minute. She also suggested prizes for who cleaned the fastest and most in each room.

Here's what I learned from "Minute to Clean it":

1) Be sure not to have the game start with all the children at the bottom of the stairs needing to run up those stairs to get to the next job - lots of elbows in the face and skinned knees on that one.

2) Just like E.T., children are mesmerized by bright colored candy. With skittles as the incentive, the children cleaned the entire house in 20 minutes (ok, so I fudged on the 1 minute thing, but they were doing so well I didn't want to disincentivize them by telling them the timer went off).

3) Be sure to have a lie detector test when leaving it to the children to tell you who did the most work. I'm still convinced the two older girls were covering for their baby sister who at the end of clean up time was conveniently lounging in a rocking chair.

Until tomorrow . . . when we tackle the Del Mar Fair!