Pet Proofing Your Home: When Your Kids Want to Have Pets

 

There will come a time in every parent’s life when their child will want to have a pet. You can say no, if you want, but it has been noted that having a pet teaches a kid to not only love unconditionally and to have a companion they can care about, but also to be responsible for another living thing. If your child wants a goldfish or a turtle for a pet, then you won’t really need to pet proof your home. If your child wants a puppy or a kitten for a pet however, then pet proofing is indeed needed.

How do you pet proof a home and why should you do so? For starters, if you do not want your dining table’s legs to become a scratching post or your carpet to become a litter box, then pet proofing is a must. Not only do you need to protect your furniture from the onslaught of claws, pee, and poop, but you also need to protect your lamps, appliances and other electrical devices from becoming useless or from breaking.

Pets can wreak havoc to a home, and while it is a good idea to give your child a pet to teach them how to be responsible for another life, preparing your home for such an addition is necessary. For your furniture’s legs, you will need to protect these from scratches by spraying these with citrus scented furniture polish or air freshener. Cats hate this and will avoid anything that smells of citrus.

For your cables and cords, try to find a way to tuck these away in places where pets cannot get to them. Tacking them to walls and covering them with cord covers will not only keep them from becoming a chewing toy for puppies and kittens, but also helps make your home look neater.

For your rugs or carpets, to stop or prevent your pets from peeing on them, you can use the same tactic that you used for your furniture legs. Spray your carpet with a solution that is made out of water and anything that has a citrus scent. Lemon works best for this, and can help stop your pets from peeing on your rugs, not to mention making these and your home smell really fresh.

Pet proofing your home is a good idea since it helps protect the pet and yourself from safety issues (exposed electrical cords from chewing, wet spots on the floor that you can slip on, etc.). It also gives your child the chance to own a pet that can become their lifelong friend.

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How to Train Your Kids to Be Organized

Training kids to be organized is probably one of those tasks that most parents dread doing mainly because the terms “organized” and “kids” don’t really go together. While it may seem like an impossibility, you can actually teach your kids to be organized; however you have to start them young. In order to do this, you also need to have the kind of furnishings needed for the proper organization of your kids’ things.

When teaching your kids organizational skills, you not only teach them how to keep a place clean and orderly, but you also teach them how to manage their time wisely. Being organized, after all, means that you have things in proper order, and that can mean anything from being able to keep to a set schedule, to keeping things in the proper place, to looking neat and tidy. Organizational skills is something everyone should have in order to reduce clutter in their lives, and having your kids learn this at an early age will benefit them in the long run.

To start your kids down the right path to being organized, you should first have storage furniture that they can use. Make sure that each kid has their own storage unit so that they know that things have to be in the proper place all the time. Have storage units for the different things that they own, like toy chests or cubbies for their toys, bookshelves for their books, and drawers or dressers for their clothes. Once you have a defined storage system for their things, you can then move on to teaching them where to put what they own.

For your kids to truly embrace being organized, you need to set a schedule for when they can play with their toys, read their books, and other similar activities. You also need to set rules for keeping things in proper order, like returning one toy before getting another, or putting books away first before they can watch cartoons on television. Setting ground rules will help them realize that they need to put things in order first before they can do other things, or before they can get the privilege of enjoying other activities.

While this particular endeavor may take a lot of patience and time to get done, being able to teach your children to put things where they should go is an achievement. This will benefit them till they have their own families and kids to teach such skills to, and will benefit you as well since you will have an organized home that you won’t have to stress about being too messy because of disorganized kids.

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Messy Home Problems Discouraging Parents from Having More Kids

Okay, maybe not really discouraging them to have more kids, but certainly making them think twice, or even thrice, about adding more children to the brood. When you have one kid, you find that following them around and cleaning up after them is easy enough to do. When you have another one however, you find that after you have cleaned on kid’s mess, you have to go take care of what the other kid just did, and so on and so forth.

Some parents find that thinking about the work involved with having another child, in terms of keeping a home clean anyway, is rather discouraging. Imagine having to clean after one kid, then needing to do the same with another kid, and then another kid. This does not have to be the case. You can actually find ways to make the task of keeping your home clean less stressful and tiring, and all you need are clever ways to teach your kids to clean up after themselves, as well as storage units that they can easily use.

One particular storage unit that you can consider for your kids toys, books, and other odds and ends, is the storage cubby. You can find this kind of storage furniture used in many pre-schools, and you can use this in your home too. These can come in various configurations, with the most popular being the 12 cubby variant. There are smaller versions of such a storage facility, like the 6 cubby and 9 cubby ones, however the one with 12 storage slots is chosen more-often-than-not due to it not being too big or too small.

Having a storage unit is just one of the things you need. Next thing you need to consider is how to teach your kids to put away their stuff when they are done using these. To make such a task appealing to children, you should try to make a game out of it. First thing you need to do is to divide the cubbies among your two kids, and assign them their own units. You should then label each one with their name and the kind of things that should be placed in each cubby.

In order to encourage them to put their things away, make this into a contest for both of them. The last one to put away everything they own will have one less cookie, or one less scoop of ice cream for their snack. This will make them want to put away their stuff after using these, and eventually, they will get used to putting these away without a fuss.


Image Credit: Design Bolts

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Is Motherhood a Thankless Job?

They say that being a mom is a thankless job. I actually beg to differ. Sure, having two kids can be rather tiring, and yeah, “thank you” is not really something you expect from a small child when you do things for them, but hey, motherhood is not a thankless job.

You may be wondering why this suddenly popped into my head, this idea that motherhood is not as thankless as people make it out to be. Well, while browsing the internet while the kids were taking a nap, I happened upon a video of a company hiring people for a “job” that had rather ungodly hours, crazy work expectations, and no salary. People objected to the terms that were being presented to them, only to find out later on that the job they were being offered was something millions were already doing, and this was by moms.

This struck a nerve with me. Sure, we clean after our kids after they make a huge mess of their nursery without anyone helping us. Sure we have to hold in our bodily fluids when our kids need us. And sure, we delay satisfying our own needs so that their needs will be met first. It is a daunting task, and we persevere as moms, but to say that this “profession” is thankless? I don’t think so. Seeing your kids grow up into the kind of human beings you can be proud of, seeing them smile, getting their hugs, and having their unconditional love is all the thanks I need.

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