Summertime improvements | ADHD Information

Susieb,

I applaud your efforts and bet that you will be able to continue it throughout the school year.  I've done this type of thing the last few summers with success.  but then this last school year, I didn't stay on top of it.   Oh, my house has been a disaster!  I think I wasn't very good about keeping it up for several reasons...we needed to wake up at 5:30 to get to school at 6:30, ds had a very heavy load of courses, I was more tired at the end of my work day, my youngest seemed to take advantage of the situation and leave more of his stuff around the house, (dh has done this for years), and basically I seem to have given up being chore police. 

So my goal this summer was to get rid of years of accummulated stuff that we really don't need,
get a handle on the garden
clean out the half cleaned garage and park a car  in there,
and have a lot of fun.

So this is the tenth day of summer and the garden is almost done.
the house interior seems overwhelming, I need to take a tech course all of next week, but we have had a lot of fun. 

...and the beat goes on...

Always at the start of a new school year, I try to organize our house and start off fresh, with raised expectations.  By October it's all disorganized and any new improvements have gone by the board.  So when school ended, I decided to try something new.  I decided to try to add new habits/behavior during the summer so that the habits are mostly established when school starts in August.  It seems to be working.

Every morning I leave a list for ds to do.  Things like wash up breakfast dishes, practice saxophone, take shower, hang up towel, sweep kitchen and vacuum bedrooms.  He mostly does a pretty good job, although sometimes I have to go behind him on the dishes.  I do that when he's not looking so he won't get discouraged.  The most amazing thing is that he doesn't seem to mind.  I'd give up on doing this kind of stuff during school because I'd get too much of a fight.  I don't think that because of the time constrataints during the school year that he's going to have time to sweep my floor, but for the summer, it's kind of nice.  Anyway, what I'm suggesting to other parents is that you use the time in the summer to work on this kind of stuff.

Of course, it could just be that ds is growing up and getting a little bit more reasonable.  I've told him that my goal as a mom is to raise a reasonable human being that can function in society and be kind to people.  Maybe I'm succeeding!
I like your idea susieb...thanks for sharing