How to get yourself/your kid (maybe?) to do boring stuff

 Well! Hello there! It’s been about a zillion years since I have been here to bestow my boundless wisdom into the ether, but it’s a new year (off to a fucking insane ridiculous dumpster-fire start) so what better time than to write something non-useful?! 

Today, I bring you Jessica’s top tips for motivation through boring stuff! These are my best distilled (who am I kidding?) tips that I regularly use to force myself to do* boring things that must be done. I have tried out most of these with the 9-year old as I struggle hard to try to convince him to complete the endless worksheets that are supposed to make him learn from home (but mostly make him hate school, and get mad at me). I tried getting the Ok from his teacher to just burn all of this and go look for bugs under logs instead, but that was not well-received. So, since I am a rule-follower, we are slogging through the backlog of work, sprinkling these tools along the way, keeping the old “get ‘er done” goal in sight. 

 

1.     Change of scenery

Yes, we set up a room in the house (formerly the guestroom, but what even is a guest anymore?) as a “classroom” with desks and such, but moving around to work in different areas can break things up and help motivate. Some places we do work: the playroom floor, the couch, the porch, the kitchen counter, the trampoline (not while jumping, that would be a bit dangerous from a pencil-stabbing-eyeballs standpoint), the outdoor couch, the garden, the 3^rd floor, etc. 

 

We use these smooth and rigid plastic bin-lids from Ikea as work surfaces for non-iPad work when I am coercing the children to do school work in these different non-desk locations. 

School on the trampoline - who would have thought?

2.     Colors and things

When doing something boring and repetitive, why not at least spice it up with some fancy colored pens? Or use some cute seahorse stamps to make your 6x7 array example instead of just drawing pencil dots? Stickers? I love this shit. 

I feel very pro with my handy change-of-scenery-friendly colored pencil/marker caddy made from some yogurt containers and zip ties. 

Yogurt containers are handy and cheap!

Cute, and also harder to lose.

 

3.     Chunks

Break up each giant, intimidating piece of work into manageable chunks: one worksheet page, half an hour of washing glassware, etc. You can even add chunks to a to-do list and cross them off, or make a spreadsheet and color-code the completed/to-do cells to celebrate and track progress. 

 

4.     Snacks

I learned this one from someone on Twitter: self-bribery with treats. Allow yourself/your kid to enjoy a gummy bear or similar treat after completing a given little chunk of work. 

 

I also like to use healthy snacks like celery sticks, carrots, snap peas, etc. to keep my mouth and therefore part of my brain busy and distracted while doing something boring. This is weirdly effective.

 

5.     Gum

Chewing gum might be helpful for reducing stress (and therefore maybe improving focus) for those with sensory-processing issues (i.e. see this study), although other work (like this study) suggests it can be distracting and negatively affect attention. Toss up?

Remote kindergarten - oh my.

6.     Background music/podcasts and such

I often work much better in loud-ish and/or busy environments (coffee shops, my office with the door open and people walking around talking, etc.). Quiet nothingness makes me feel like I need to be somewhere else – surely there must be something better happening that I am missing? Similarly, I can’t possibly do things like repetitive labwork or house cleaning without listening to podcasts or a book on tape, or talking on the phone.  

 

Maybe put on the soundtrack to The Mandalorian or Star Wars to make it seem like you’re accomplishing something important and slightly dangerous? 

 

7.     Trading

Sometimes, the kids trade with one another – the little one does a few too-hard multiplication equations while the older one does a few too-easy lines of handwriting. The older one’s handwriting is pretty messy, and the little one at least grasps the concept of multiplication, even if she’s not quite as adept, so it tends to work out for a few minutes…at least long enough for them to be happy to get back to doing their own work for a while. 

 

I do mental trading with myself – i.e. if I do this one hard thing that I hate (like budgets), then I can do some of this other thing I really enjoy (like writing). 

 

I have yet to figure out how to trade so that the kids do MY boring tasks, but I’m thinking it’s high time they learned how to clean a bathroom at least. Maybe in exchange for coloring? Why do they hate coloring? It’s so relaxing! 

 

Have these tools worked for motivating myself? Why, yes, indeed! For my kids? Not so much! Please send wine/your advice/COVID vaccines. 

All the things: change of locale, colors, snacks, distracting birds singing in the background, etc.

(*Caveat: you know I have ADHD, so whether or not I actually complete boring things is another story, but these to tend to help them move in the direction of maybe being done.)

Perfect Parenting Projects

Hello from Impending Doom (i.e. Sunday night before another week of pandemic parenting)! I hope you are holding up – if so, you are killing it! Nice job! 

For those of you who, like me, now have a preschooler at home and previously had absolutely no skills at keeping said preschooler engaged because you work and they go to preschool for a reason, I am here to share with you my new Perfect Parenting Projects advice. I’m qualified to provide this advice because my brother and his wife are preschool professionals, and I have rudimentary Vulcan Mind Meld skills (don’t tell), so I can now be trusted to guide you along on this newly-appointed-preschool-teacher journey. 

Step 1: Flail around on various Montessori-at home websites, and become totally overwhelmed by the volume of material and required time investment. Also get extremely confused because you have no formal Montessori training and you are not privy to the above-mentioned mind meld. Close 45 tabs and come back to this one. Now. Ready?

 

Serenity - it will all be ok (maybe, unless we all die and/or lose our jobs/housing//family members/friends, but who is counting...ok back to focusing on relatively small things because the rest is too much)

Step 2: Set up a sensory day:

(a)   Sight – cut paint swatches in half, and/or gather pairs of different-looking things like different sized washers, nuts, bolts, etc.  kid can do matching and then also ordering. Kids with Montessori experience in particular totally get this. It’s kind of magical. 

Estimated set-up time: 5-20 minutes. 

Estimated time this will keep them busy: 5-20 minutes, depending how hard you made it (I had like 16 shades of taupe – so proud of past me for keeping those). 

(b)  Smell – grab some things from the kitche that are kind of obvious-smelling and wrap them in foil, then poke some holes in them. Offer them to your kid to identify.
Estimated set-up time: 5 minutes. 

Estimated time this will keep them busy: 3 minutes. 

Not the most visually appealing

(c)   Taste – cut up tiny pieces of things and have your kid close their eyes & pop them into their mouths. Probably best not to give them things that will make them freak out, like maybe no jalapeños, and probably nothing deemed “gross”. 

Estimated set-up time: 2-5 minutes. 

Estimated time this will keep them busy: 3 minutes. They will probably ask to do it again with different things. 

(d)  Touch – put random objects into a cloth bag and have your kid try to identify them without looking in the bag. 

Estimated set-up time: 5 minutes of casting about the random things in kitchen drawers. 

Estimated time this will keep them busy: 5-20 minutes, depending on how hard you make it and how many clues you give. 

(e)   Hearing – re-use your paper towel/TP rolls to make matching-paired-shakers. Put inside things like dry beans, washers, rice, etc. 

Estimated set-up time: 30 minutes. 

Estimated time this will keep them busy: Maybe 5 minutes, but more like 2 if you make it too easy. 

There are probably faster & definitely less crappy ways to do this

Step 3: Design and carry out a super-creative craft project using items from nature:

(a)   Find an old Glass Gem corn cob in a drawer. 

(b)  Kernels must be plucked off using tweezers. This is good for fine-motor-skill development/practice. Disclaimer: I did not come up with this; we bought this cob to copy a work from the little one’s preschool, but then the little one decided the cob was too precious to take apart. However, I convinced her to use the cob for this work because of the awesome final-outcome, which will be to have a beautiful necklace to wear and show off said awesome kernels.

(c)   When the older child decides this looks way more fun than doing math worksheets that have been assigned, spend 30 minutes negotiating with the little one that the older child can also pluck half of the kernels from the cob as long as the little one gets to wear all necklaces made from said kernels.

(d)  Drill holes in a portion of the kernels the younger child has plucked while the children try to build robots from random nuts and bolts, and you explain what torque is and why the little whirring battery-powered motor that will spin a tiny propeller won’t propel a wood/nuts & bolts robot across the floor.

(e)   Partway through the hole drilling, the kids get bored of their robot plans.

(f)    The younger child decides she doesn’t want to make a necklace after all, and the kernels now must just live in the bowl she put them in. 

So pretty! Maybe I'll just make a necklace for myself

Step 4: Feel discouraged. Decide maybe we can just do playdoh, read, and watch movies for the next month. That probably never killed anyone.  

Never underestimate the awesomeness of facepaint

How to get your kid set up for remote-learning

In this very weird new world we find ourselves in, connected to others by computer, phones, and waves across a 6-foot chasm, I thought I would share with you my winning solution to getting your elementary-school kids set up for their new remote-learning situation. 

First, try not to let the emails from your school district learning coordinator, superintendent, principal and teacher get lost amongst the avalanche of emails re-assuring you that it is totally fine to re-book your airline flight, buy cupcakes delivered by disinfected drone, sign up for a zoom-based exercise class, etc. 

Next, once you have located the relevant emails amongst the haystack of others, pour yourself some coffee (or other beverage), take a deep breath, and sit down to read them.

 

These kids are way smarter than you might realize. This guy made his own worksheet, and one for his sister, after re-arranging our guest room into a makeshift classroom the day we learned that schools were closing. 

After reading the emails, save them as PDFs or print them, or put them in a special folder, and/or mark them as unread, and add a star/flag/whatever, because you are going to have to find them again. 

Now, lay down and have a good cry. My cry was mostly about how sad I feel for my kids, who love their schools so damn much, and their friends, and their teachers. Yes, it’s really nice in many ways to have more time together – but holy shit I am a terrible little-kid teacher and I am definitely not a good little-kid-friend, and our house is not in any way a substitute for a school environment. 

After you have a good cry, and feel better even though it doesn’t particularly help anything, wait until the next day. 

Try again, this time with your kid. Open the emails. Walk through the instructions step by step with your kid, and let your kid explain the parts you don’t get (“I already know how to do this, mom”). Maybe throw in a little “stop clicking so quickly!” in your best curmudgeonly voice. 

Be grateful that (if you are lucky like me), your kid’s teacher/school is amazing, and their expectations are reasonable.  

Or, if not, maybe sent them an email. This is all a weird experiment and no one knows what on earth we are doing. 

Then hug your kids. And maybe cry a little more. 

Along the same lines as the first photo, when you have no idea what you are doing, your kids might just come up with their own learning projects. The 4 yr old came up with her own Montessori-based ordering work using these wrenches when I was fixing our car a few weeks ago (the kids did not find watching me get dirty and frustrated very interesting).